On-call & escalations

Rotations, overrides and escalation chains — page the right person until someone acknowledges.

On-call turns "a channel got a message" into "a person is responsible": a schedule decides who is on call at any moment, and an escalation policy keeps paging — person by person, step by step — until someone acknowledges the incident.

Schedules (who's on call)

Go to Alerting → On-call → Schedules and create a schedule:

Rotation — daily, weekly, or every N days. Participants take turns in order; the handoff happens at the time you pick, in the schedule's own timezone (stable across daylight-saving changes).
Layers — most teams need one. Add more for follow-the-sun or business-hours setups: a higher layer with a time restriction (e.g. Mon–Fri 09:00–17:00) covers those hours, the base layer covers the rest. Overnight ranges (22:00–06:00) wrap past midnight.
Overrides — "Tomas covers the weekend". An override replaces whoever the rotation would pick for its time range — vacations and swaps without touching the rotation.

The schedule card shows who is on call right now, until when, and a week or month calendar of shifts. Below the calendar, per-person totals for the visible period — time on call, share of the period and shift count — make on-call compensation math straightforward. A shift is counted in the period its handoff (end) falls in: a week ending on the 1st belongs to the new month, not the month it started in.

Escalation policies (what happens on an incident)

A policy is an ordered chain of steps for critical incidents:

Notify the on-call person of schedule X → wait 5 minutes →
Notify the next target (another person, a whole channel…) → wait →
…and optionally repeat the whole chain if still unacknowledged.

Each step can target the current on-call of a schedule, a specific person, or a notification channel. Acknowledging the incident stops the chain — same convention as PagerDuty or Opsgenie. Resolving it (or a maintenance window silencing the monitor) stops it too.

Personal notification methods

Escalations page people through their own methods — not the shared channels. Everyone sets theirs up under On-call → My notifications: email, Telegram, ntfy, Pushover, Gotify and Pushbullet. A participant without methods shows a ⚠ warning in the schedule editor — they can't be paged until they add one.

Activating a policy

Attach the policy to a notification group (Contacts → Contact Groups → select the group → Escalation policy field, then Save). Every monitor whose alerts route through that group then escalates critical incidents through the policy — regular channel notifications keep working alongside.

Warnings never page the on-call chain — only critical incidents do. The regular channels still receive warnings as usual.

Plans

The number of on-call schedules depends on your plan. See pricing for what's included.