A mid-market IT operations lead evaluating PagerDuty, incident.io, Datadog On-Call, and AlertOps in April 2026 named the structural concern that decided his shortlist: “I don’t want to rely on slack to wake up an on-call person at 2:00 AM. For example, if a critical service goes down.” The instinct is correct. Chat is excellent for ambient awareness during business hours and for collaborative response once an incident is declared. It is not the right channel for waking up an engineer at 2 AM. The platforms that confuse the two functions produce missed pages.
This guide covers reconnecting Slack and Microsoft Teams during an Opsgenie to AlertOps migration. The principle that organizes the reconnection: chat is the supplement to the paging channel, not the replacement. Voice, SMS, mobile push with DND override are the paging surfaces. Slack and Teams handle acknowledgement, status updates, and collaborative response after the page lands.
Two-channel architecture diagram showing AlertOps’s policy engine routing a single incident across two distinct surfaces. The paging channels (voice call, SMS, mobile push with Do-Not-Disturb override) handle reliable wake-up notification at any hour. The chat channels (Slack and Microsoft Teams) handle two-way acknowledgement, status updates, and war-room coordination. Both surfaces are coordinated through one AlertOps policy, with chat as supplement to paging rather than replacement.
What Opsgenie was doing with Slack and Teams (and what to preserve)
Most Opsgenie deployments used Slack and Teams for three things. Inbound alert posting to a designated channel so the team had visibility. Two-way acknowledgement so an engineer could click “Ack” in the channel and the source alert would mark as acknowledged. Status updates as the incident progressed.
A representative configuration from a mid-market financial services team: “Any alert that comes from AWS goes through OpsGenie and it posts in our Slack channel during business hours. Whoever is available takes the request. For off-hours, there is a schedule and it’s then to the on-call person.” The Slack channel handled the daytime triage. The off-hours schedule fired through voice and SMS as the paging channel. Both worked together.
An MSP configuration was similar but with a voicemail-to-Slack twist: “I grab the attachment from OpsGenie and I create a ticket with it, but I also upload that recording right into Slack. So within the slack themselves they could there’s a play button that automatically allows them to play that message.” The voicemail audio attached to a Slack message so the team could listen to the customer’s reported issue without leaving chat.
Both patterns preserve cleanly during the migration to AlertOps. The reconnection is procedural, not architectural.
How to reconnect Slack and Microsoft Teams during the migration
The full procedure runs in four steps.
Step 1: Install the AlertOps Slack and Teams apps in your workspace. The apps register the AlertOps inbound webhooks and configure the OAuth scopes for two-way acknowledgement. For organizations with security review processes, the apps go through the standard internal review before installation; AlertOps provides the security documentation and SOC 2 attestation for that review.
Step 2: Configure the channels that should receive alert posts. For each team or service, designate the Slack channel or Teams channel that receives inbound alert posts. The mapping typically mirrors the Opsgenie configuration. Capture the channel ID for each routing target during the configuration.
Step 3: Configure the chat-side acknowledgement workflow. AlertOps supports two-way acknowledgement from both Slack and Teams. An engineer clicks “Ack” in the channel; the AlertOps incident updates; the escalation pauses. Configure the acknowledgement buttons per channel. For Teams environments, the integration uses adaptive cards rather than slash commands for the acknowledgement UX.
Step 4: Configure the paging channels separately from the chat channels. This is the principle that organizes the reconnection. Slack and Teams handle visibility and acknowledgement. Voice, SMS, and mobile push with DND override handle the actual paging. Configure the paging channels in the AlertOps schedule so the on-call engineer receives the wake-up notification through the channels that bypass Do-Not-Disturb. A ski resort operations team described the Opsgenie DND override workaround they had to maintain: “It can call from several different numbers when it triggers the on call. So we had to whitelist certain contacts, but there’s like 20 different phone numbers under it just so that it will get through DND.” AlertOps’s DND override is a first-class scheduling configuration rather than a contact-list maintenance burden.
The pattern: chat is supplement, paging is paging
The structural principle that prevents the “Slack at 2 AM” anti-pattern: chat and paging are different functions and need different channels. Slack and Teams excel at:
- Ambient visibility during business hours
- Two-way acknowledgement once an engineer is awake and at a keyboard
- Status updates as the incident progresses
- Collaborative response (the “war room” channel that gets the incident team coordinated)
- Post-incident review collaboration
Slack and Teams do not excel at:
- Waking up an engineer through DND
- Reliable delivery through phone OS notification settings the user controls
- High-attention paging during off-hours when chat is silenced
The platforms that conflate the two produce missed pages. The platforms that separate them produce reliable wake-ups plus rich collaborative response. AlertOps treats Slack and Teams as architectural peers to voice, SMS, email, and mobile within a single policy engine. The policy designates which channels page and which channels ack. The chat side stays useful without becoming load-bearing for off-hours wake-ups.
What gets configured per channel preference
For each role in the response chain, the right channel preference differs. An on-call SRE typically wants Slack acknowledgement plus mobile push with DND override, a vendor contact wants SMS as the primary paging channel, a director receiving exec notification wants voice, a NOC operator monitoring multiple feeds wants Teams, and the compliance officer wants email. All five fire through one AlertOps policy, and the migration is the moment to set channel preference explicitly per role rather than relying on the channel defaults Opsgenie inherited.
Frequently asked questions
How do I reconnect Slack to AlertOps after migrating from Opsgenie?
Install the AlertOps Slack app in your workspace, configure the channels that should receive alert posts, enable the two-way acknowledgement workflow, and configure the paging channels (voice, SMS, mobile push) separately from the Slack channels. Slack handles visibility and acknowledgement; voice/SMS/mobile handle the actual wake-up paging.
Does AlertOps support two-way acknowledgement from Slack and Teams?
Yes. An engineer clicks “Ack” in the channel; the AlertOps incident updates; the escalation pauses. Slack uses interactive message buttons. Teams uses adaptive cards.
Should I use Slack to wake up on-call engineers at 2 AM?
No. Chat is for ambient visibility during business hours and for collaborative response once the engineer is awake. Off-hours paging needs to go through channels that bypass Do-Not-Disturb (voice, SMS, mobile push with DND override). AlertOps’s policy engine handles paging and chat as separate channel functions through one incident.
How does AlertOps handle Do-Not-Disturb override?
DND override is a first-class scheduling configuration in AlertOps, set per schedule. The wake-up reliability is handled by the platform rather than by maintaining many whitelisted phone numbers in user contact lists (the Opsgenie workaround pattern).
Can my MSP voicemail-to-Slack workflow migrate?
Yes. The pattern of attaching customer voicemail recordings to Slack messages for team review preserves cleanly during the migration. AlertOps supports voicemail capture from inbound calls and attachment posting to designated Slack or Teams channels.
Do I need to reconfigure my Slack channels during the migration?
The channel-to-team mapping typically mirrors the Opsgenie configuration. Capture the existing Opsgenie channel mappings during the Phase 1 inventory, then reconfigure them in AlertOps during the integration setup. The AlertOps migration team handles the configuration as part of the engagement.
