Help Center/On call and schedules

How escalation works

Escalation makes sure an incident does not sit unnoticed. If the person who was paged does not respond, Oncall pages someone else. This article explains who, and when.

The steps

  1. The person who is on call is paged.
  2. After 5 minutes without an acknowledgement, the next person in the rotation is paged. This is the secondary.
  3. After another 5 minutes, the team’s managers are paged (team members with the Manager role). If the team has no manager who can be reached, the company’s admins are paged instead, up to three. It is the last step.

Stopping it

Acknowledging or resolving the incident stops escalation at any point. You do not have to wait for a step to finish.

How you know

When a page reaches you because of escalation, the SMS starts with “Oncall: ESCALATED”, and the incident’s status changes to Escalated.

Check your team

Make sure each team has a manager (or that your company has an admin with a phone number or Slack) and at least two people in its rotation. If not, escalation has nobody to reach.

Coming soon: your own escalation policies, with custom steps and timings.

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