How We Moved Our Support On-Call Off PagerDuty in Under an Hour
On September 18, 2026, the four engineers on the JAMS Customer Support on-call rotation stopped taking after-hours pages through PagerDuty and started taking them through JAMS Incident Management. End to end, the move took under an hour.
We build JAMS Incident Management, so read this knowing we have a stake in how it turned out. We were also a PagerDuty customer for a few years, which means we can describe the switch with real timings instead of a feature grid. If you’re weighing a PagerDuty alternative and assuming the move means rebuilding every schedule by hand, this is what it took for us.
Why we were on PagerDuty in the first place
Before PagerDuty, an after-hours call to the JAMS support queue went to an outside answering service. The operator took notes, said they couldn’t help, and phoned the on-call manager. The first person to hear about a customer’s problem was someone who couldn’t do anything about it.
PagerDuty replaced the answering service. Our engineers started answering their own phones, and support got better for it.
What we needed from it was narrow: take alerts from Zendesk, manage the on-call rotation, and escalate when nobody answered. PagerDuty did that. For us, it was also expensive, and we were paying for a lot of features we were never going to use.
Schedules are the hard part
“The number one complaint from people coming off PagerDuty is that there is no easy way to convert schedules. So we built that into the product.”
Kevin Casey, Director of Development, JAMS Software
Adding people to a new on-call tool is quick. So is reconnecting the systems that send alerts. Rebuilding months of rotations, handoffs, and backup contacts by hand is not, and that work is what keeps teams on a tool they’d rather leave.
So the PagerDuty conversion tool in JAMS Incident Management brings over:
People
Teams
Schedules
Rotations
Escalation policies
You run it yourself. Our schedules came across in seconds.
What the switch took
Converted the schedules. We ran the PagerDuty conversion tool. People, teams, schedules, rotations, and escalation policies came across in seconds.
Sent invitations. Each of the four engineers had to accept an invitation before JAMS Incident Management could page them.
Connected Zendesk. We set up the Zendesk webhook, and it was working within minutes.
Support was up and running in under an hour.
How an after-hours ticket gets handled now
A customer opens a support ticket in Zendesk.
The ticket triggers an alert in JAMS Incident Management.
JAMS Incident Management calls whoever is on call. If they don’t answer, it calls the next person.
An engineer in our on-call rotation acknowledges the page and gets to work on the customer’s issue.
The call now goes straight to someone who can fix the problem.
Where AI fits in JAMS Incident Management
The AI in JAMS Incident Management answers questions from the documentation and helps you set up alerts. It makes suggestions and helps you build what you need. It doesn’t make changes to your systems on its own.
We add AI to our products for two reasons: to help customers use the product well, including when they’re troubleshooting, and to get new customers set up faster. It’s the same approach we take in JAMS Scheduler.
There’s a lot of hype around AI SRE today. In our experience with customers, very, very few have deployed any kind of autonomous AI SRE in production. The vast majority still need the basics: integrations with the platforms they run, an on-call rotation that works, and alerts that reliably escalate to the right humans.
If you’re looking for an autonomous AI SRE product, JAMS Incident Management isn’t a good fit for you today. We’ll build more AI and autonomy into it as our customers need it.
The full case study has the at-a-glance version of our switch. To see how your own schedules come across, the trial below runs the same conversion tool we used.
