Slack
The person on call gets a Slack direct message they can acknowledge with one tap, and your team’s channel gets a post that updates as the incident moves along. Every page also goes out by SMS.
Connect Slack
You need to be an Oncall admin, and allowed to add apps to your Slack workspace. It takes about a minute.
- Add Oncall to Slack. Open Settings → Integrations → Slack and click Add to Slack. Slack asks you to allow Oncall into your workspace. Click Allow, and you land back in Oncall with Slack marked Connected.
- Pick each team’s channel. In the same Slack panel, choose a channel for each team, for example
#incidents. That team’s incidents are posted there. - Invite Oncall into that channel. In Slack, open the channel and type
/invite @Oncall. Oncall only posts in channels it has been invited to, public or private. Without it, people still get their direct messages, but nothing appears in the channel.
That’s all. There are no IDs, keys or settings to copy anywhere.
How Oncall knows who you are
This decides who gets messaged and who can press the buttons.
If the emails are different, link your accounts once. Open Profile → Where you get paged, click Connect next to Slack, and sign in with the Slack account you actually use. A linked account always wins over email matching. To change it, click Unlink, then Connect again.
Why so strict? Pressing Acknowledge in Slack acts as you in Oncall: it puts your name on the incident and stops the escalation. Oncall only does that for a Slack account it can tie to a real person in your company. Guests, and people from other companies in shared channels, are never matched by email, so they can’t acknowledge your incidents.
When you’re on call
- You get a direct message from Oncall with the incident and two buttons, Acknowledge and Resolve. The SMS still comes too.
- Your team’s channel gets a post with the same buttons, so everyone can see what is happening.
Press Acknowledge to say you have it. Oncall records it, stops escalating to the next person and updates both messages. Press Resolve when it is fixed. Anyone in your company whose Slack account is matched or linked can press the buttons, not only the person on call.
If Slack says it couldn’t match you
“I couldn’t match your Slack account to an Oncall user”
If this private reply appears after you press a button, nothing changed. Use the same email in Slack as in Oncall, or link your account under Profile → Where you get paged. Then press the button again. The incident keeps escalating until someone acknowledges it, so if you are in a hurry, use the link in the SMS or Oncall itself.
Commands
- Mention Oncall in a channel to open an incident:
@Oncall checkout is failing sev1. It goes to the team that uses that channel (or your company’s default team) and pages whoever is on call. Addsev1tosev4to say how serious it is. /oncall whoshows who is on call right now./oncall page <what’s wrong> [sev1-4]opens an incident and pages on call, from anywhere in Slack.
Only full members of your Slack workspace, or people whose Slack is linked to their Oncall account, can do this. Guests and people from other companies can’t.