On-call schedules and escalation policies
An alert sent to everyone is an alert nobody owns. On-call schedules decide who is responsible right now, and escalation policies keep going until someone acknowledges.
Rotations
A schedule is a rotation of team members with a shift length and a start time. Pick from 12-hour, daily, weekly or fortnightly shifts, add the people in the order they take turns, and Uptime Dog works out who is on call at any moment and shows the next shifts so everyone knows when they're up.
Overrides
Holidays, sick days and swaps are overrides: a person and a time range. While an override is active it takes precedence over the rotation, and when it ends the rotation carries on as before, with nobody having to rearrange the schedule.
Escalation policies
A policy is a list of steps, each with a delay. A step can notify the person on call in a schedule, named people, any alert channel, or the whole team. For people, you choose how each step reaches them: email, SMS, a phone call or a mix.
A typical policy:
- Straight away: the person on call for "Primary", by SMS and email.
- After 10 minutes: the same person by phone call, plus the #incidents Slack channel.
- After 20 minutes: the person on call for "Secondary", by phone call.
- After 30 minutes: the whole team by email.
Policies can repeat, so if the last step passes without an acknowledgement, the policy starts again from the top.
One-click acknowledge
Every alert, whether email, SMS, Slack or any other channel, carries an acknowledge link. Opening it shows the incident and a button; pressing it stops the escalation and tells the team the incident has an owner. Acknowledgements also reach PagerDuty and Opsgenie if you use them. The incident's timeline records who acknowledged and when, which feeds the mean time to acknowledge in your reports.
SMS and phone calls
SMS and voice alerts are sent through Twilio. Calls read the alert out twice and are kept for bad news: a service going down, a test or a reminder. Recoveries and acknowledgements go by SMS and the other channels. Each SMS or call uses one credit from your monthly allowance: Essentials 20, Pro 100 and Business 300 credits a month. The Free plan doesn't include SMS or calls.
Schedules by plan
| Plan | Free | Essentials | Pro | Business |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| On-call schedules | Not included | 1 | 5 | Unlimited |
| Team seats | 1 | 3 | 10 | 25 |
| SMS and call credits a month | Not included | 20 | 100 | 300 |
Escalation policies can be attached to any monitor, or set as the team default. Monitors without a policy alert their own channels instead.
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