--- title: On-call schedules, escalation policies & personal paging description: Alerts dropped in a shared channel hoping someone is awake are not on-call. Define who is on call with rotations, quick-setup presets and a live preview; a… canonical: https://watchfor.io/changelog/2026-08-17-oncall-escalations --- [All updates](/changelog/page/7#2026-08-17-oncall-escalations) ✨ New Aug 17, 2026 · v 6.8.1 # On-call schedules, escalation policies & personal paging Alerts dropped in a shared channel hoping someone is awake are not on-call. Define who is on call with rotations, quick-setup presets and a live preview; a month calendar shows per-person totals and shift counts for fair compensation, and shifts can be covered with one-click overrides or permanent replacements. Escalation policies page the right person step by step through their own methods — email, Telegram, ntfy, Pushover, Gotify or Pushbullet — and stop on acknowledge, resolve or maintenance. A Notification Flow view draws the whole path: channels first, who gets paged now, who is next. Who is on call now, the month ahead, and each person's totals. The Flow view draws the whole path from first message to last escalation. ## Who is on call A schedule answers that for any moment. Pick a rotation (daily, weekly or every few days), a handoff time and the people who take turns, or start from a quick-setup preset. The editor previews the next four weeks while you type. Add layers for business hours or follow-the-sun cover. The schedule card shows who is on now and until when, then a week or month calendar with each person's total time and shift count, so on-call pay is a lookup. Add override handles "Tomas covers the weekend"; clicking someone in the legend replaces them in every layer, now or from their next shift. ## What happens on an incident An escalation policy is a list of steps for critical incidents: page the person on call, wait 10 minutes, page the team lead, wait again, post to a channel, optionally repeat. It stops as soon as someone acknowledges or resolves the incident, or when a maintenance window or mute covers the monitor. People are paged through their own methods, set up under My notifications : email, Telegram, ntfy, Pushover, Gotify or Pushbullet. ## An example At 02:40 the checkout API goes down. Your Slack channel gets the alert as usual, and Priya, who is on call this week, gets a Pushover alert and a Telegram message. She's asleep. Ten minutes later the chain pages Jordan. He acknowledges at 02:53, the chain stops, and the incident timeline records who was paged and when. ## Turn it on Create a schedule and a policy under Alerting → On-call , then attach the policy to a contact group. The Flow button shows the whole path, channels first, then each step with who would be paged right now. See [On-call & escalations](/docs/alerting/on-call). Since then: on-call [reports](/changelog/2026-08-23-oncall-reports), and a [warning when the person on call can't be paged](/changelog/2026-09-23-oncall-unreachable-notice). Share this update --- Canonical page: https://watchfor.io/changelog/2026-08-17-oncall-escalations · Site guide: https://watchfor.io/llms.txt