Glossary · Incidents and alerting
On-call is the arrangement in which a named person is responsible, for a set period, for responding to alerts and incidents outside normal working hours, or around the clock.
An on-call schedule rotates the responsibility through a team, often weekly, with a handover at a fixed time. Overrides cover holidays and sick days, and an escalation policy brings in someone else when the person on call doesn’t respond.
Good on-call depends on the alerts: each page should be urgent, actionable and rare. A rotation in which people are woken for things that can wait until morning wears people out and teaches them to ignore alerts; that is alert fatigue.
Runbooks, clear ownership and time off after a rough night keep a rotation sustainable.
Uptimecheck on-call schedules rotate through people every day, week or two weeks, handing over at a time you choose in the schedule’s time zone. Cover a shift lets someone take over for a while, and a push channel set to “Whoever is on call” alerts only that person’s devices.
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Guides 7 min read
False alerts teach teams to ignore monitoring. How to cut the noise: confirm every failure with a second check, set sensible timeouts, validate the right URL and route alerts to the people who can act.
ReadGuides 5 min read
How to tell customers about an outage: who speaks, how often, on which channel and in what words. A one-page plan, severity levels, update cadence and ready-to-use templates for status pages, email and social media.
ReadA week is the most common rotation; shorter shifts suit teams with frequent alerts. Hand over during working hours, so questions can be asked.
The schedule says who is responsible now. The escalation policy says what happens when that person doesn’t respond in time.
Page only for what needs a person now, confirm failures before paging, send everything else to a channel read during the day, and go through every page in the week after.
Set up your first monitor in under a minute, or look around the live demo first.
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