1. Introduction

Purpose of This Guide

Migrating your existing on-call management solution to Datadog On-Call can significantly improve your operational efficiency, reduce costs, and streamline alerting and incident management. This guide outlines a structured approach to migrating smoothly and effectively. Typically, organizations begin this migration after successfully trialing Datadog On-Call with one or two teams, validating its capabilities and ensuring it aligns with their operational requirements.

By following this blueprint, you will understand the key stages involved in migration, including preparation, testing, and final deployment, and you’ll have a clear idea of next steps.

Who Should Use It

This guide is intended for stakeholders directly involved in the migration process, including DevOps engineers, Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), team leads, and anyone responsible for configuring, maintaining, or managing your on-call processes.

2. Assess Your Current On-Call Setup

Inventory Current Tools and Workflows

Begin by creating a comprehensive list of all the tools currently paging your on-call team. This includes monitoring platforms (such as Datadog), ticketing systems, and internal or custom-developed tools. For each tool, document the current integration method—whether it’s through native integrations, webhooks, email ingest, or other means.

This step is also an ideal opportunity to evaluate whether you wish to retain these integrations as they are or instead leverage one of Datadog’s 800+ integrations. Consolidating key telemetry into Datadog can streamline monitoring, reduce complexity, and help you achieve a unified operational view under a single pane of glass.

Identify Gaps and Pain Points

• Analyze which parts of the current vendor setup are inefficient or costly.
• Document any user feedback about slow response times, unclear escalations, or missing features.

3. Plan the Migration

Project Scope and Timeline

Effective planning is crucial for a successful migration. Break your migration plan into clear, manageable phases:

1. Discovery: Document current integrations, workflows, and user needs.
2. Configuration: Set up Datadog On-Call according to your documented requirements.
3. Testing: Thoroughly validate all workflows, alerts, and escalations before finalizing the migration.

Clearly assign responsibilities to specific owners for each phase, and set realistic deadlines. Communicate these timelines and responsibilities widely and clearly across your teams to ensure everyone is prepared and aligned. Establish direct communication channels, such as a dedicated Slack or Microsoft Teams space, where team members can ask questions, raise blockers, and stay up to date on progress. T

This phase is also an excellent time to prepare your organization for the transition—encourage all teams who will be impacted to proactively download and set up the Datadog mobile app to ensure they can receive critical push notifications without delay.

4. Prepare and Configure Datadog On-Call

Familiarize with Datadog On-Call and Teams

Before diving into configuration, spend some time becoming familiar with Datadog On-Call, particularly the “Teams” concept. Teams are foundational for structuring your on-call management in Datadog—they group users, schedules, and escalation policies, providing a clear and organized structure for managing incidents and responsibilities.

Consider how your current vendor’s assets, such as schedules and escalation policies, map onto Datadog Teams. This mapping step is crucial and can greatly simplify the transition.

Datadog offers a dedicated migration tool (as of now for PagerDuty only) designed to easen your transition by selectively migrating relevant schedules, escalation policies, and other critical components directly into Datadog On-Call. Rather than manually recreating your existing rotation schedules—whether daily, weekly, or other formats—you can leverage this tool to automate the migration process, significantly reducing manual effort. This selective migration approach also gives your organization the opportunity to leave behind accumulated toil, such as unused or outdated schedules, offering a fresh start.

5. Start Routing Alerts and Complete the Migration

With your Datadog On-Call setup fully configured, confidently route your alerts directly to Datadog. Utilize the monitor migrator tool to effortlessly reroute your existing monitors to your On-Call Teams. Notifications will reliably reach your designated teams, ensuring timely responses and streamlined incident management. During the transition period, some teams choose to double page using both Datadog On-Call and their existing provider to maintain a fallback option while validating the new system, so you can use the monitor bulk editor to append new on-call handles without yet removing your old provider.

Once you have confidence in your Datadog On-Call setup, proceed to fully decommission your previous on-call vendor. Depending on your organization’s needs, choose between a phased migration or a complete “big-bang” cutover. Clearly define scope if performing a phased approach and have a rollback plan ready to address any critical blockers swiftly. Ensure your documentation, such as wikis and runbooks, is updated to reflect new on-call procedures and contact methods.

6. Resources and Next Steps

You’ve now completed the core migration process to Datadog On-Call. To ensure continued success and long-term maintainability of your on-call processes, there are a few final recommendations:

• Explore Additional Documentation: Dive deeper into Datadog’s documentation on [incident management][6], [On-Call Schedules][7], and integrations.
• Join our Datadog community: The Slack Community program is a network built by Datadog users for Datadog users to help each other find answers to questions or to share product tips and tricks. [Join Slack Channel >][8]
• Stay Informed: Subscribe to [Incident Response product updates][9] to take advantage of new features as they roll out.

Appendix: Checklist

Here’s a ready-to-use checklist you can copy-paste in your notes tool of your choice:

1. Stakeholders for migration have been identified
2. All current alerting tools have been inventoried
3. Integration methods (webhooks, email ingest, etc.) for each tool are documented
4. Pain points and inefficiencies in the current on-call setup are documented
5. Migration phases (Discovery, Configuration, Testing) are clearly defined
6. Project owners and deadlines are assigned
7. Internal communication plan is shared across teams
8. Direct support channels (Slack, Microsoft Teams) are set up for Q&A
9. Datadog mobile app is recommended and set up by on-call users

[5]: bulk editors [6]: /ko/service_management/incident_management [7]: /ko/service_management/on-call/schedules/ [8]: https://chat.datadoghq.com/ [9]: https://app.datadoghq.com/release-notes?category=Incident%20Response