What Oncall does
Oncall makes sure that when something breaks, the right person hears about it fast and somebody takes it. Here’s how the pieces fit.
Incidents
An incident is something that needs a person: a failing checkout, a server down. It can come from a tool you connect (like Grafana OnCall or a webhook), from Slack, or from someone pressing New incident. Each one has a severity from SEV1 (most serious) to SEV4, and a status.
Who’s on call
Each team has a schedule: a rotation of people who take turns being on call, handing off daily or weekly at a set time. Whoever is on call when an incident arrives is the one paged.
Paging
Paging means reaching that person. Every page goes out by SMS with a link to acknowledge in one tap. If your company uses Slack, they also get a Slack message with buttons.
Escalation
If nobody acknowledges within 5 minutes, Oncall pages the next person in the rotation, and 5 minutes later the team’s managers, or the company’s admins when the team has none. Acknowledging or resolving stops this straight away.
Home
Home is where you land after signing in. Under the greeting, a status line says either “All clear” or how many incidents need acknowledging and which is the most serious, with Review to see them.
Below it are four numbers: Open, Need acknowledging, Assigned to you and This week, which also says how that compares with the same days the week before. Each one opens the matching tab on the Incidents page.
Needs attention lists up to 5 incidents that are waiting for someone to acknowledge them, most serious first, each with an Acknowledge button (with a mouse, it appears when you point at the row). Its count is the full number, and View all shows the rest. Recent lists the 5 newest of the others. Who’s on call is beside them (below them on a phone); see Who’s on call.
Under Who’s on call, Recent activity shows your company’s latest incident events, newest first and grouped by day: who acknowledged or resolved what, escalations, pages and notes. Several pages for one incident within two minutes show as one line. Click a line to open its incident.
The Open and This week numbers have a small trend line for the last 14 days. Point at it or drag along it (or focus it and use the arrow keys) to read any day; the line under the number shows that day.