Escalations
Unacknowledged incidents are automatically escalated to other teammates. Customizable delays, retries, and multiple escalation levels ensure real incidents aren’t missed.
Escalation Rules:
Escalation rules are built in to our on-call scheduling system. You can configure HeyOnCall to, for example:
- page the next person after 15 minutes, then
- page the team’s manager after 30 minutes, then
- page the CTO after 60 minutes.
Any one of those people acknowledging the incident will stop the escalation.
Easy to Configure:
Alerts initially route to the currently on‑call person in your on-call rotation schedule. Customize escalation delays, retries, and multiple levels of escalation until the incident is acknowledged.
And not everything needs to wake your team up at 3am! Our Critical Alerts are optional and flexible, and escalations are optional and flexible too: covering everything from “prod is on fire” all the way to “the SSL certificate expires in 3 weeks”. We also have built-in Business Hours Schedules to defer non-critical alerts to your preferred business hours.
TLDR:
Built for small engineering teams and solo founders, HeyOnCall delivers reliable and impossible-to-ignore on-call alerts. With escalation rules, Critical Alerts, configurable severities, and business hours schedules, our service helps your team deliver reliability while avoiding burnout.
Escalations: HeyOnCall vs. Alternatives
| Differentiator |
HeyOnCall
|
Alternatives |
|---|---|---|
| Escalations | Automatic escalation of unacknowledged incidents to other teammates. Easy to configure with customizable delays, retries, and multiple levels until acknowledged. | ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ |
| On‑call | Integrated on-call rotation schedules and escalations. | Separate products for monitoring and on-call: requires integration glue between them, so there are more moving parts to fail during an outage. |
| Mobile apps | Lightweight mobile apps for iOS and Android. Designed to reliably deliver alerts and let you quickly acknowledge the incident. | ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ |
| Alerting | iOS/Android “Critical Alerts” bypass Do Not Disturb and volume/mute settings. Repeat until acknowledged. Will wake you up! | No mobile app. No critical alerts. Emails or Slack alerts are easy to miss for hours. |
| Silencing | Quick silence with selectable timeout at the trigger, service, or organization-wide level. Ensures you don’t keep getting alerts while you’re fixing the issue, and ensures you don’t inadvertently stay silenced forever. | Mute one monitor at a time. Forget to unmute after the incident is over, so you miss the next incident. |
| False positives (noisy alerts) |
Customer-level: False positives are reduced to your preferences via customizable consecutive-failure thresholds / timeouts. Platform-level: False positives are reduced through continuous control group self-checks, extensively tested codebase, and code paths designed to differentiate our network incidents from yours. |
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ |
| False negatives (missed alerts / blind spots) |
Customer-level: Missed alerts are reduced via: alerts repeat until acknowledged; configurable multiple delivery channels per user; configurable multi-level escalations. Blind spots are reduced via configurable assertion rules on HTTP response headers, etc. Platform-level: False negatives are reduced via extensive CI test suite, continuous production self‑checks, and external monitoring. |
Customer-specific glue (webhook integration) between separate monitoring product and on-call product fails silently (webhooks/auth headers/network issues), resulting in missed alerts right when you need them. |
| Pricing | Simple, flat $/month pricing. Free tier forever. | Annoying $/user/month or $/monitor/month. |
Escalations FAQ
Why are escalations important?
Escalation rules make sure high-severity incidents aren’t missed by your team just because one person doesn’t get their page.
Humans are human, and even with our impossible-to-ignore Critical Alerts, dropping your phone in the lake is going to be a bad day, whether you’re on-call or not.
With automatic escalation rules, you can make sure that the phone-in-the-lake scenario delays your team’s incident response by minutes, not days.
Do all incidents need to follow the same escalation rules?
No. You can easily configure different escalation rules for different services and severities.
Does this mean that everyone on the team will get alerted for every incident?
No. As soon as anyone acknowledges the incident, the escalation stops.
“Acknowledging” an incident is as easy as tapping a button in our app. It only means that the person who acknowledged it is now responsible for investigating the problem or finding the right person to help, and the automatic escalation stops.
Do escalation rules apply to teams-of-one?
No. However, for solo developers, we have a related feature: Multiple Alert Delivery Channels. Our lightweight mobile apps for iOS and Android deliver alerts with all the bells and whistles listed above. But we also integrate with Slack, email, webhooks, and more.
If you’re a solo developer, there’s not much we can do if you drop your phone in the lake! See also: bus factor of one.
Who gets alerted?
Alerts route to the on‑call person in your on-call rotation schedule.
This works for solo founders too: until you add teammates, the default on-call schedule is just you, 24/7!
How do I get alerted?
Alerts are sent via the free HeyOnCall mobile apps for iOS and Android.
We have special permissions to deliver “Critical Alerts” on both iOS and Android. Critical alerts bypass the phone’s Do Not Disturb and silent/vibrate modes. They are LOUD and impossible to ignore.
The alerts will keep getting sent repeatedly (at a configurable interval) until you acknowledge the incident.
That sounds incredibly annoying! How do I turn it off?
Acknowledging the incident stops the alerts.
You can also configure non-critical alerts, which will be delivered as normal push notifications. These respect your phone’s normal Do Not Disturb and silent/vibrate modes.
We also have a vibrate-only mode, which will still buzz in your pocket, but won't make any sound.
During an incident, you can also silence all alerts at multiple levels up to organization-wide, so you don’t keep getting paged while you’re in the middle of trying to debug things.
What if I don’t notice the alert?
We have escalation rules built in. You can configure HeyOnCall to, for example, page the next person after 15 minutes, then page the team’s manager after 30 minutes, then page the CTO after 60 minutes. Any one of those people acknowledging the incident will stop the escalation.
Can I get alerts in Slack?
Yes. Connect Slack and our bot will post messages into your desired Slack channel for team visibility and collaboration. You can use this Slack channel for team awareness, while you rely on the iOS/Android critical mobile alerts for wake-you‑up-at-3am paging.
Why deliver alerts via a mobile app instead of email or Slack?
Emails and Slack messages are super easy to miss for hours, especially if you’re away from your desk.
Why deliver alerts via a mobile app instead of SMS or phone calls?
Mobile apps are more reliable for on-call alert delivery than SMS or phone calls because HeyOnCall has special permissions to use Critical Alerts that bypass Do Not Disturb, silent/vibrate modes, and volume settings, and deliver repeatedly until acknowledged. SMS and phone calls don’t have those capabilities, and are easier to miss in the noise of SMS/phone spam.
Using our mobile apps for on-call alert delivery helps your team respond faster to urgent issues, and reduces team burnout by preventing escalations from missed alerts.
Do you support both Android and iOS?
Yes. The HeyOnCall mobile apps are available for iOS and Android, with identical features, user experience, and alerting capabilities, including Critical Alerts that bypass Do Not Disturb, silent/vibrate modes, and volume settings.
What makes HeyOnCall better than alternatives?
Alternative solutions often require you to stitch together separate monitoring and on-call alerting tools using brittle webhooks between them. For example: would you really trust your self-hosted monitoring server to be able to send a POST request to your third-party alerting service exactly when you’re in the middle of a flaky network outage? :facepalm: Not exactly a recipe for reliability.
HeyOnCall integrates website monitoring, API monitoring, heartbeat monitoring, on‑call schedules, and alert delivery in one product, which removes fragile links and makes the overall system more reliable.
Mobile apps. Critical alerts. On-call schedules. Escalations. Monitoring for websites, APIs, cron jobs, and SSL certificates. All built-in and battle-tested. Designed for developers, by developers. Simple, flat pricing. Free tier forever.
How fast can I get started?
Sign up (free tier forever), download the iOS/Android app, and send yourself a test notification delivered in seconds.
Live sandbox resets hourly.
No sign-up required.
No credit card required.
Free tier forever.