A schedule says who is on call. On call management decides what happens when an alert fires: who is paged first, through which channel, how long the system waits, and who is next if nobody answers. IncidentBot handles that sequence for every service, records every step, and makes sure an alert never stops at a phone on silent.
| Tier | Notify | Channels | Escalate after |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Primary on-call, Payments | Push, then SMS | 5 min |
| 2 | Secondary on-call, Payments | SMS and voice call | 10 min |
| 3 | Team lead, Payments | Voice call | 15 min |
| Repeat | Whole policy | Once | After tier 3 |
An escalation policy is an ordered list of tiers. Each tier notifies a target and waits a set time for acknowledgement. If nobody acknowledges, the next tier is notified. When the last tier is reached, the policy can repeat from the top.
Escalation policies and schedules import from PagerDuty and Opsgenie, including tiers, targets and timeouts. You review the result, adjust anything that should change, and switch the integration endpoint when you are ready.
IncidentBot pages by mobile push, SMS, voice call, email and Slack. Each engineer sets their own notification rules: for example push immediately, SMS after one minute, voice after three. Paging runs on its own infrastructure, so an outage in your chat tool never silences an alert.
Acknowledging stops the escalation and tells everyone the alert has an owner. From the same notification, the responder can escalate to the next tier, reassign to a colleague or open an incident in Slack.
Handoffs are where context gets lost. At the end of each shift IncidentBot sends the outgoing and incoming engineers a summary: open alerts, incidents in progress, anything acknowledged but not resolved. The team channel gets a notice with who is on call now.
Good on call management is also about the people carrying the pager. Reports show time to acknowledge by service and tier, how often escalation reached the second or third tier, and how many pages each engineer received out of hours.
Most teams settle on a short first timeout for customer-facing services, a secondary on-call as the second tier and a team lead or the whole team as the final fallback. Keep low severity alerts off the phone until business hours, and review escalation reach every month: if tier two answers often, the primary rotation needs attention.
The policy repeats as many times as you configure. We recommend a final tier that always reaches someone, such as a team lead or the whole team, and the incident simulator warns you when a policy has no fallback.
Yes. A person or schedule can appear in any number of policies. Notification rules are personal, so each engineer is paged the same way regardless of which policy reached them.
Yes. Starter includes 100 SMS and voice notifications per user per month. Team, Business and Enterprise include unlimited SMS and voice paging under fair use. Enterprise adds a 99.99 percent paging uptime SLA.
Try a policy in the simulator, then create your account and connect your first service.
Your work email and your team size. That is all we need to set up the account.
One price per seat for alerts, on-call, Slack incidents, status page and postmortems.