If you've ever done pager/on-call duty, you're probably familiar with a tool like PagerDuty. PagerDuty collects email alerts from your monitoring tools and sends out automated phone calls and SMS messages to the person currently on-call. The app supports many of the usual amenities in an alerting system, such as retry of unanswered alerts, on-call rotations, and automatic escalation of unanswered alarms.
Many large tech companies like Google and Amazon have sophisticated in-house on-call management and alerting systems. We have tried to build something similar for small and medium-sized businesses running critical systems.
One of the big challenges in building PagerDuty was making it simple and intuitive to use. If you find the setup process (or any other part of the system) confusing please let us know.
http://www.pagerduty.com