When every alert goes to everyone, nobody owns it. The developer who was up last night assumes someone else will look, the one on holiday has muted notifications, and the outage waits. An on-call schedule makes it simple: one person is responsible right now, everyone knows who, and the alert goes to them.
Rotations
- Add the people who take turns, in the order they take them, up to 30 people.
- Choose how often the shift changes: every day, every week or every two weeks.
- Pick the handover time, such as Monday at 09:00, in the schedule’s own time zone.
- See who is on call now, the coming shifts and any overrides on one page.
Overrides
Plans change. Cover a shift lets someone take over for a while, such as a sick day, a holiday or a dentist appointment, without touching the rotation. When the override ends, the rotation carries on as before. If two overrides overlap, the one added last wins, and people who leave the workspace are skipped automatically.
Push alerts to whoever is on call
Turn on push notifications on your phone and computer, then add a push channel set to “Whoever is on call”. When a monitor goes down, only the person on call right now gets the lock-screen alert, on iPhone, Android or desktop. Push costs nothing and needs no extra app; on iPhone, add Uptimecheck to the home screen first. The recovery replaces the outage notification, so the lock screen stays tidy.
Escalation when nobody responds
Combine the schedule with escalation. Post every outage to the team’s Slack channel right away, push to whoever is on call after 5 minutes, and email the team lead if the outage has lasted an hour and nobody has acknowledged it. When someone acknowledges the incident, in the app or with the Acknowledge button in Slack, the delayed alerts are never sent. See alerts and notifications for every channel.
A typical week
Anna is on call from Monday at 09:00. On Friday she is at a wedding, so Erik covers the day with an override. At 03:12 on Saturday, back in Anna’s shift, the checkout returns 503. The outage is confirmed by a second check, Anna’s phone shows the push alert, and she acknowledges the incident in the app. The escalation email to the team lead never goes out, and the incident timeline shows who was alerted and when.
Keep on-call humane
- Send only real outages to on-call push. Slow alerts and expiry reminders can go to email or a team channel.
- Keep shifts long enough to plan around and short enough to recover from; a week is common.
- Review alerts after each shift: if an alert woke someone and nobody needed to act, change the routing.
- Use maintenance windows for planned work, so a deploy at night does not page the person on call.
Fewer, better alerts make on-call bearable. Uptimecheck checks from Stockholm, Sweden, and confirms every failure with a second check before an incident opens, and our guide to reducing false alerts covers the rest.
On-call schedules and push notifications are included on every plan, and the live demo has a schedule you can look at without signing up.
Plans start at €9 per month billed yearly or €12 billed monthly, excl. VAT. See the pricing page, or start a 14-day free trial without a card.