PagerDuty vs Aurora: Different Tools, Different Jobs

What PagerDuty Does Well

Where PagerDuty Stops

What Aurora Does Differently

Autonomous Investigation

Multi-Cloud Native

25+ Verified Integrations

Knowledge Base with RAG

AI Code Fix Suggestions

Automated Postmortems

Feature Comparison

Cost Comparison

When to Use PagerDuty + Aurora Together

When Aurora Alone Might Be Enough

Getting Started

Further Reading Key Takeaway: PagerDuty is the industry standard for alerting and on-call management — but it doesn't investigate why incidents happen. Aurora is an open source AI agent that plugs into PagerDuty via webhooks and autonomously investigates root causes across AWS, Azure, GCP, and Kubernetes. They're complementary tools, but for teams spending hours on manual RCA, Aurora fills the gap PagerDuty doesn't cover. PagerDuty has over 30,000 customers and dominates on-call management. It's excellent at what it does: detecting alerts, routing them to the right person, coordinating incident response, and tracking SLAs. But here's the problem: PagerDuty pages you. Then you're on your own. The actual investigation — SSHing into servers, querying CloudWatch, checking Kubernetes pod logs, correlating deployments with error spikes — is still manual. According to the VOID (Verica Open Incident Database), the median incident involves 3.5 contributing factors, and the investigation phase consumes the majority of mean time to resolve (MTTR). This is the gap Aurora fills. This isn't a "which is better" comparison. PagerDuty and Aurora solve different problems: They work together. Aurora ingests PagerDuty incident.triggered webhooks. When PagerDuty pages your SRE, Aurora is already investigating in the background. PagerDuty's strengths are real and well-established: PagerDuty has also added AI features through PagerDuty Advance, including: Despite the AI additions, PagerDuty's investigation capabilities have limits: No autonomous multi-step investigation. PagerDuty's SRE Agent surfaces past incidents and patterns, but it doesn't autonomously query your AWS accounts, check Kubernetes pod status, correlate Terraform changes, or trace dependency graphs. The investigation itself is still on the engineer. No native cloud infrastructure querying. PagerDuty receives alerts from CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, etc. — it doesn't query them directly. It can't run kubectl get pods or aws cloudwatch get-metric-data on your behalf during an investigation. No knowledge base with vector search. PagerDuty's RAG capability is partial — it requires configuring Amazon Q Business as an external integration. There's no native vector search over your runbooks and past postmortems. No code fix suggestions. PagerDuty can surface recent code changes that may be related to an incident, but it doesn't generate remediation code or create pull requests. AI features are paid add-ons. AIOps starts at $699/month. PagerDuty Advance starts at $415/month. These are on top of per-user pricing ($21-$41+/user/month depending on tier). Aurora is an open source (Apache 2.0) AI agent that automates the investigation phase — the part that happens after you get paged. When Aurora receives an alert webhook, its LangGraph-orchestrated AI agents: No human in the loop during investigation. The SRE gets paged by PagerDuty and finds a completed RCA waiting in Aurora. Aurora connects directly to your cloud infrastructure: Aurora includes a built-in Weaviate-powered vector store. Upload your runbooks, past postmortems, and documentation — the AI agent searches them during every investigation using semantic similarity, not just keyword matching. Aurora can generate pull requests with remediation code via its GitHub and Bitbucket integrations. It doesn't just tell you what's wrong — it suggests how to fix it with actual code. Structured postmortem documents generated automatically with: For a team of 20 SREs on PagerDuty Business with AI features: Aurora's costs are infrastructure (a VM or K8s cluster) and LLM API usage. With Ollama running local models, the LLM cost is also $0. Note: PagerDuty pricing verified from pagerduty.com/pricing as of March 2026. Aurora is free under Apache 2.0. The strongest setup is running both: PagerDuty handles the who and when. Aurora handles the why and how to fix it. For smaller teams or budget-conscious organizations: Aurora can ingest webhooks directly from any monitoring tool — PagerDuty is not required. Configure your PagerDuty webhook to point at Aurora, add your cloud provider credentials, and investigations start automatically. Templates let you quickly answer FAQs or store snippets for re-use. Hide child comments as well For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse