Automate Helpdesk and SRE workflows
Accelerate incident resolution for DevOps & IT Ops
Overview
IBM On Call Manager empowers SRE and helpdesk teams to operate with confidence by automating the workflows that turn signals into action. It intelligently correlates alerts, reduces noise, and orchestrates on‑call schedules, notification, and escalation so incidents reach the right engineer or support responder at exactly the right moment. Seamlessly integrated into modern observability, IT operations, and collaboration ecosystems, On Call Manager helps teams restore services faster, streamline first‑line response, minimise downtime, and maintain reliability at scale without the chaos.
Key features
- Automation and Alert Optimization
- Deeper Integrations
- Notifications
- Reports
- Mobile app
- Incident Command Center
Automation and Alert Optimization
Cut through the noise and focus on what truly matters. On Call Manager leverages intelligent automation to enrich alerts with context, suppress duplicates, and prioritize incidents based on impact and urgency. By reducing alert fatigue and highlighting the issues that require immediate attention, teams can respond faster, make better decisions, and resolve incidents more efficiently—without being overwhelmed by unnecessary notifications.
Deeper Integrations
On Call Manager seamlessly integrates with the monitoring and operations tools SRE & Ops already rely on. With over 30 pre‑built integrations—including platforms such as Instana, Jira, Salesforce and ServiceNow, and a broad range of operational and observability tools—On Call Manager acts as the central alerting and coordination layer across your technology stack.
Notifications
Deliver the right alert to the right person, at the right time. On Call Manager provides multi‑channel notifications via email, live routing, mobile app push notifications, Slack, SMS, and voice calls, ensuring responders are instantly informed wherever they are. This guarantees rapid awareness, reduced response times, and seamless collaboration across teams and tools.
Reports
Turn incidents into insights. On Call Manager enables teams to generate, preview, and download detailed incident reports, helping you analyse response performance, identify trends, and continuously improve operational readiness. Ideal for audits, post‑incident reviews, and operational transparency.
Mobile app
Stay connected on the go. The On Call Manager mobile app, available on Android and iOS, empowers responders to receive alerts, stay informed, and take action anytime, anywhere—ensuring uninterrupted operations even outside the office.
Run major incidents from a single command view
When a client-impacting incident hits, On-Call Manager's Incident Command Center gives your team one coordinated workspace. Manage incidents, assign roles and tasks, manage responders, send stakeholder communications, and document everything as you go — with automation handling the repetitive process steps so your team stays focused on resolution.
Use cases
- Notification & Escalation
- Incident Automation
- SRE Incident Response
- Major Incident Coordination
24×7 Intelligent On‑Call Scheduling & Escalation
Always reach the right expert, anywhere in the world
Primary persona Operations managers, SRE managers, IT operations lead’s
The problem Managing global on‑call coverage is operationally brittle:
- Complex rotations across regions and time zones
- Manual schedule maintenance and overrides
- Missed or delayed alerts when schedules aren’t accurate
- Limited visibility into “who is on call right now
How IBM On Call Manager helps On Call Manager provides advanced, schedule‑aware notification orchestration:
- Group‑based ownership with time‑zone aligned rotations
- Custom shift patterns (on‑call vs on‑duty)
- Automatic escalation when acknowledgements are missed
- Real‑time visibility into on‑call status (“who’s on”)
- Mobile‑first acknowledgements and overrides on the go
Business value
- Reliable 24×7 coverage without manual effort
- Reduced risk of missed critical alerts
- Increased accountability and responder confidence
- Better work‑life balance through predictable rotations
Helpdesk & IT Operations Incident Automation
From alert to action without manual handoffs
Primary persona IT operations teams, helpdesk managers, service desk engineers
The problem First‑line support teams are overwhelmed by:
- High volumes of low‑quality alerts and tickets
- Manual ticket creation and routing
- Disconnected tools between monitoring, ITSM, and collaboration
- Poor visibility into incident ownership and progress
How IBM On Call Manager helps IBM On Call Manager bridges monitoring, ITSM, and collaboration tools by:
- Correlating events into incidents before tickets are created
- Automatically routing incidents to the correct group or responder
- Integrating bi‑directionally with ITSM platforms (e.g., ServiceNow)
- Enabling two‑way collaboration via Slack or Teams
- Providing audit trails, timelines, and reporting for compliance
Business value
- Faster response by eliminating manual triage
- Fewer unnecessary tickets and escalations
- Clear ownership from first alert to resolution
- Improved service desk efficiency and customer experience
SRE Incident Response at Enterprise Scale
Cut through alert noise and restore services faster
Primary persona Site Reliability Engineers, Platform SRE leads, NOC teams
The problem In large, complex environments, a single infrastructure or application failure can generate hundreds or thousands of alerts across monitoring tools. SRE teams struggle with:
- Alert fatigue and duplicate signals
- Slow identification of the real incident
- Manual triage, paging, and escalation
- Delayed resolution and increased downtime
How IBM On Call Manager helps IBM On Call Manager automatically ingests events from observability platforms and applies intelligent correlation. Related alerts are grouped into actionable incidents, priorities adjust dynamically as impact grows, and the platform automatically:
- Assigns incidents to the right SRE group
- Follows on‑call schedules and escalation policies
- Notifies responders via mobile app, SMS, voice, Slack, or email
Business value
- Dramatically reduced alert noise
- Faster mean time to acknowledge (MTTA) and restore (MTTR)
- Improved service availability and reliability at scale
Major Incident Coordination
Primary persona — Incident Managers, SREs, Support Engineers, Operations leads
The problem — When a major incident hits, coordination itself becomes a problem: team members scattered across Slack channels, status updates done manually, roles ambiguity, stakeholders uninformed, and no single record of what happened and when
How ICC helps — The Incident Command Center gives every responder one place to work from. Declare the incident, assign an Incident Commander, track tasks, send structured stakeholder updates, and build a complete timeline, using slack commands or the UI.
Business value
· Faster acknowledgement and resolution times
· Consistent, auditable incident records
· Reduced coordination overhead and human error
· Clear stakeholder communications throughout
· RCA and timeline ready for post-incident review
Key Benefits
IBM On Call Manager accelerates response by automating the entire incident notification and escalation lifecycle. Intelligent alert correlation, dynamic prioritization, and schedule‑aware routing ensure incidents reach the right responder immediately reducing MTTA and MTTR and minimizing business impact.
Outcome: Less downtime, faster service restoration, improved reliability.
By automatically deduplicating, suppressing, correlating, and grouping events, IBM On Call Manager cuts through alert floods caused by complex, distributed environments. Teams focus on actionable incidents instead of chasing redundant or low‑value alerts.
Outcome: Reduced alert fatigue and higher responder effectiveness.
IBM On Call Manager combines intelligent routing with advanced on‑call scheduling to ensure alerts are delivered to the most appropriate expert based on availability, role, group ownership, and escalation policies globally and across time zones.
Outcome: Fewer missed alerts and clear accountability for incident ownership.
With native iOS and Android apps and multi‑channel notifications (mobile, SMS, voice, email, Slack), responders can acknowledge, escalate, and manage incidents from anywhere without being tied to a console.
Outcome: Faster acknowledgements and responsive operations, even on the go.
IBM On Call Manager is built for enterprise scale, offering verified notifications, secure authentication (SSO), granular access controls, audit logs, and comprehensive reporting for governance and compliance requirements.
Outcome: Trust, transparency, and audit‑ready incident management.
With 30+ incoming integrations, 10+ outgoing integrations, and fully extensible APIs, IBM On Call Manager fits naturally into modern SRE, DevOps, ITSM, and collaboration ecosystems without forcing tool replacement.
Outcome: Faster time to value and protection of existing investments.
By automating repetitive tasks such as alert triage, assignment, escalation, and notifications, IBM On Call Manager allows SRE, helpdesk, and IT operations teams to focus on higher‑value work rather than manual coordination.
Outcome: Increased operational efficiency and lower operational costs.
From detailed incident timelines and notification logs to the full Incident Command Center audit trail, IBM On Call Manager captures everything teams need to analyse response effectiveness, run post-incident reviews, and continuously improve. RCA documentation is built in — so learnings from today’s incident inform tomorrow’s response.
Outcome: Stronger operational maturity and resilience over time
When client-impacting incidents strike, the Incident Command Center keeps every responder aligned in a single workspace — incident declaration, role assignment, task tracking, stakeholder communications, and a live timeline. Automation handles the process overhead, such as creating a slack channel for facilitating communication, and auto-generating Teams meetings links and posting in the auto-generated slack channel, so teams stay focused on resolution.
Outcome: Faster incident management and time to resolution
Frequently Asked Questions
It’s ideal for IT operations teams, DevOps engineers, and any organization that needs to manage incidents effectively and keep services reliable.
You can configure escalation policies so that if the first on-call person doesn’t respond in a certain timeframe, the alert automatically moves up to the next person in line.
The Incident Command Center (ICC) is a built-in capability in IBM On-Call Manager designed specifically for major incident management. It gives teams a single coordinated workspace to manage incidents, assign roles and tasks, manage responder communications, send stakeholder updates, and document a full timeline — all without leaving the platform.
On-call notifications get the right person paged. The ICC takes over once that person and their team are engaged — it manages the coordination, communication, and documentation through to resolution and RCA. Think of it as moving from ‘who’s on call?’ to ‘how do we automate the incident management and resolution?’
Primarily Incident Managers, SREs, Support Engineers, and Operations leads — anyone involved in the active response to a client-impacting incident.