An Ode to OpsGenie

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With the news of OpsGenie shutting down and everyone looking for possible alternatives, we wanted to take a moment—not just to acknowledge the end, but to rewind and revisit the journey that brought them here.

Over the years, it carved out a meaningful place in a competitive market, and in the workflows of thousands of teams. This is a look back at where it all began, what made OpsGenie different, and the mark it leaves behind.

Introduction

The story of OpsGenie starts in Turkey.

Its founding team—Berkay Mollamustafaoglu (CEO), Abdurrahim Eke, and Sezgin Küçükkaraaslan—all worked together at iFountain, a tech company where Berkay was CTO. After years of building together, they took the leap and co-founded OpsGenie in 2012.

It was a great time to build for incident response. Infrastructure was moving to the cloud, and the operational pressure on teams was growing fast. PagerDuty had already kicked things off in 2009, and xMatters had been around since 2000. VictorOps launched around the same time as OpsGenie.

This wasn’t an empty field—it was a race. And OpsGenie was off to a fast start.

The Incident Response Market in 2012

OpsGenie wasn’t alone in the space.

PagerDuty had launched in 2009 and raised $1.9M early on. By January 2013, they raised another $10M and were priced at $18/user/month, later introducing a $9 plan.
VictorOps, which launched just after OpsGenie, offered a free tier and $27/user/month paid plan.
xMatters, the earliest to market, hadn’t captured as much attention despite launching in 2000.

OpsGenie entered with competitive pricing—$8, $14, and $24 per user per month—and a product that was already earning traction. By 2016–17, many of us were already customers.

Why? Because the timing was perfect.

More businesses were moving online. Uptime was becoming existential. And while teams had always cared about being alerted, the tooling to support that responsibility was still evolving. OpsGenie caught the same frequency as PagerDuty: self-serve, accessible, simple to adopt.

OpsGenie’s Product Differentiation

From my research—and my own experience—OpsGenie stood out by focusing on a few critical things:

The mobile app just worked. In a world where getting woken up by a phone call was expected, having an app that helped you act quickly was essential.
Team-based collaboration during incidents. This wasn’t just about sending alerts—it was about helping teams coordinate.
Tagging and automation. OpsGenie allowed teams to tag events and incidents, which later enabled workflow automation.
Alert de-duplication. This was huge. OpsGenie worked hard to reduce noise—a philosophy that directly inspired how we built Suppressed Incidents at Spike.

It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t flashy. It was just solid.

I was an OpsGenie user during my time at Wingify. I’ve used both PagerDuty and OpsGenie (before the Atlassian acquisition), and there was something distinct about the way OpsGenie respected the on-call engineer’s experience

Funding and Acquisition

In 2016, OpsGenie raised a $10M round from Battery Ventures to accelerate growth. And by 2018, they were reportedly making $20M in revenue with over 3,000 customers.

That’s when Atlassian stepped in and acquired OpsGenie for $295M.

That same year:

VictorOps was acquired by Splunk for $120M
PagerDuty raised $90M before going public in 2019

It was a signal that incident response had gone mainstream. Big players were entering. Great products were consolidating. And teams everywhere were finally getting the tools they needed to operate with resilience.

The End of an Era

OpsGenie timeline from launch to acquisition by Atlassian to sunsetting

In early 2024, the news started to quietly spread—OpsGenie was shutting down. Atlassian, which had acquired OpsGenie back in 2018, began encouraging users to migrate to Jira Service Management.

It wasn’t entirely surprising. The OpsGenie brand had already faded inside the Atlassian ecosystem. Feature development slowed. The changelog went quiet. But even so, for those of us who’d used it, recommended it, and learned from it—it still hit hard.

A product that once helped shape how we think about incident response will now quietly sunset into history.

Atlassian made a strategic choice. OpsGenie’s capabilities aren’t disappearing—they’re just being absorbed. But it’s worth pausing to remember what made it special.

OpsGenie wasn’t just a tool. It was a way of thinking. About clarity. About control. About simplicity under pressure.

Reflections as Spike’s Founder

As we were building Spike, I often found myself thinking about the tools I used and respected most—OpsGenie was always on that list.

Many of our early decisions were rooted in things OpsGenie did exceptionally well:

Their mobile app wasn’t just a companion—it was a central alerting interface.
Their support for multi-channel alerting (SMS, voice, email, push) wasn’t just about redundancy—it was about reliability.
They reduced alert noise with smart de-duplication, which inspired Suppressed Incidents in Spike.
Their emphasis on team-based collaboration, rather than isolated alerts, influenced how we think about routing and visibility.

One internal experiment we ran showed that over 74% of incident acknowledgements at Spike come through mobile-first channels—a pattern that mirrors the kind of usage OpsGenie helped normalize over a decade ago.

We’ve gone further since—adding support for WhatsApp, Slack, Telegram, and automation through Playbooks—but the spirit of what OpsGenie taught us remains at the core.

Closing Thoughts

OpsGenie helped define what modern incident response should look like—mobile-first, context-rich, team-oriented. Even as the product sunsets under Atlassian, the principles it championed still guide this industry.

They didn’t just build software. They helped shape how responders think about urgency, clarity, and care.
They showed us that incident management doesn’t have to be loud—it just has to be dependable.

Today, the landscape has evolved. We have automation. We have AI. But OpsGenie’s approach to making incidents more human—more thoughtful—still matters.

Tools may shut down, but the ideas behind them don’t.
OpsGenie’s best ideas live on—in products like Spike, and in every engineer who once reached for their phone at 3AM and found help waiting.

Thank you, OpsGenie. You made being on-call not just manageable—but meaningful.

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