On-call Alerts, schedules, escalations, and more

We were incredibly excited to finally share our new On-call product with you last week 🎉

We’ve been shipping loads of great work in our existing Response and Status Page products, but we’ve also been hard at work behind the scenes building On-call, which until now we haven't been able to talk about.

It's great to finally be able to show you what we're building going forward. In the meantime, we thought you might enjoy a few highlights as well as a long list of smaller improvements we made in the run-up to launch below.

With the release of On-call, we now not only provide a product for effective incident coordination, but we can also ensure your team gets proactively notified via phone, email, SMS, push notification and Slack when there is an issue, too 🔔.

Our On-call solution is built from four main components:

• Alerts: Connect tools like Datadog and Sentry to notify us if something goes wrong
• Schedules: Configure who should be on-call and when
• Escalation Paths: Define who to contact be contacted when something goes wrong
• Notifications: Notify your team via SMS, phone call, email, Slack and our mobile app ✨

Alerts

ℹ️We launched Alerts to all our customers back in January of this year

Alerts allows organizations to automatically create incidents when something fires from monitoring tools such as Datadog or Sentry. Auto-creating incidents removes unnecessary friction from the incident response process (like having to manually create incidents from alerts).

As part of the On-call release, we have added a new section to your Alert routes which allows you to specify how you want to escalate these alerts.

For example, if you would like to notify the relevant team via their escalation path and if you would like to set a delay on escalating grouped alerts (thereby giving you a chance to mark alerts as related in the incident channel before your phone starts ringing).

Schedules

Schedules determine when individuals from a team or group will be on-call. Within your schedule creation, you will have the ability to configure:

• When your handover will take place (i.e. every Monday at 9am)
• When the schedule will be active (i.e. all day, only during business hours)
• Which individuals will be on-call, and if you want more than one person on-call simultaneously
• Additional rotas, which can support models such as:
  • Follow-the-sun (i.e. spread support across timezones)
  • Shadowing (i.e. onboarding new on-call individuals)

Additionally, we’ve built out support for overrides, making it easier for your teams to handle on-call coverage if someone needs to pop out to the gym or head to a doctor’s appointment.

👀 Make sure to check out /inc cover me in Slack, which allows you to request coverage from other team members on the same schedule.

Escalations

Escalation paths tell us who you would like to reach out to and in what order. You can configure:

• Who to notify (either individuals or schedules) and in what order
• How long to try notifying before moving to the next stage
• How many times to try notifying if escalations go unacknowledged

Note, if you do not have a schedule set up, you can create a schedule inline from the escalation path creation flow or follow instructions below in the On-call > Schedules section of the dashboard.

👀 Don’t forget to check out /inc escalate to manually escalate during an incident. You can configure the form and utilize the catalog to make it easier for individuals to find the right person to escalate to.

Notifications

On-call supports notifications via Slack, SMS, phone call, email and push notification via our mobile app.

If you are an on-call, you’ll be able to:

• Determine where you’d like to receive notifications when something goes wrong and about upcoming shift notifications
• Create rules for receiving notifications (ie. notify me immediately via push notification)
• Test your notifications to make sure things are working before starting your shift

👀 We will tell you if you set your notification rules in a way that violates an escalation policy you are on, so you can adjust accordingly.

Mobile app

The mobile app for On-call will be the easiest way of engaging with On-call from setting up your on-call preferences to quickly acknowledging issues.

In the mobile app you can:

• Set up critical alerts to ensure push notifications can bypass silent and “do not disturb” modes
• Add contact card syncing to allow for SMS and phone calls to also bypass silent and “do not disturb” modes
• Configure your mobile app to light or dark mode

👀 One of the perks of having The Chainsmokers as investors is that when we were trying to figure out what our alert noises could be, they were only too happy to help. Thanks, team! 🎵

If you are interested in learning more about On-call, please reach out to hello@incident.io. And, don’t forget to check out our On-call help docs to help you get started!

🚀 What else we’ve shipped

We’ve been building On-call behind closed doors for a little while, which meant we haven’t been able to publicly shout about some of the bits and bobs we’ve shipped and fixed along the way.

There are far too many things to list out so we’ve cherry picked some highlights from just the past month as we approached launch day!