On-call and escalation

1Make a schedule

On-call, Schedules: pick the members in order, a time zone, the shift length in days, the handoff weekday and time, and a start date. Handoffs follow local wall-clock time, so a Monday 09:00 handoff stays at 09:00 across daylight-saving changes. The page shows the next 14 days.

2Make a policy

Up to 10 steps. Each step notifies whoever is on call for a schedule, or named people, by email, SMS and/or phone call, then waits N minutes. Tick what the policy covers: monitors going down, new issues, regressions. When several policies cover the same thing, the oldest wins.

3Incidents

When a covered alert fires Blipit opens one incident per source, notifies step 1 at once and escalates every 15 seconds as waits expire, until someone acknowledges or resolves. A monitor coming back up resolves its incident on its own. Owners and admins can also page by hand. Every notification, skip and failure is written to the incident timeline.

4Acknowledge

From the dashboard, from the link in the email or text (it opens a confirmation page, lasts 24 hours and works once), or by pressing 1 on the phone call. Any member can acknowledge; only owners and admins edit schedules and policies.

Good to know

• SMS and calls need a phone number verified under Settings, Phone number (6-digit code by text, 10-minute expiry, 5 attempts, 5 codes an hour). Each person gets at most 10 texts and calls an hour.
• Included texts and calls per month: Free 0, Solo 20, Team 100, Scale 500. Past that, or with no verified number, the step emails instead and the timeline says so.
• SMS and voice only work when Blipit's Twilio account is configured; otherwise those steps are skipped and noted on the timeline.