Incident Management

Create and resolve incidents, with reliable alerting, silencing, on‑call scheduling, escalations, Slack, webhooks, and incident history.

Incidents:

When something looks off beyond your configured failure thresholds and timeouts, we create an incident, page the right people through your on-call schedules via loud critical alerts to our iOS and Android apps, post the incident to your Slack channel, and keep alerting and escalating until someone on your team acknowledges.

Monitoring:

HeyOnCall automatically creates incidents from your monitors, including: website monitoring, API endpoints, cron jobs, SSL certificates, Prometheus, Datadog, and custom integrations. Alerts route to the currently on‑call person in your on-call rotation schedule. Incidents resolve automatically when the underlying checks recover.

Unacknowledged incidents are automatically escalated to other teammates. Customizable delays, retries, and multiple escalation levels ensure real incidents aren’t missed.

Collaboration:

Keep everyone aligned with Slack integration and webhooks to your systems. 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.

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.

Incident Management: HeyOnCall vs. Alternatives

Differentiator	HeyOnCall	Alternatives
Incident management	Easy-to-configure incident management for immediate on-call response, collaboration and silencing during an incident, and incident history after the fact.	Limited ability to handle a wide range of incident severity levels.
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.
Escalations	Automatic escalation of unacknowledged incidents to other teammates. Easy to configure with customizable delays, retries, and multiple levels until acknowledged.	¯\_(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.
Mobile apps	Lightweight mobile apps for iOS and Android. Designed to reliably deliver alerts and let you quickly acknowledge the incident.	¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Business hours schedules	Defer important-but-not-urgent alerts (like maintenance or non-urgent incidents) until your preferred weekdays and hours.	No differentiation between urgent and non-urgent alerts. Burns out your on-call team waking them up for things that can wait until the morning.
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.

Incident Management FAQ

How are incidents created?

Incidents are created automatically from your monitors. These include: website monitoring, API endpoints, cron jobs, SSL certificates, Prometheus, Datadog, and custom integrations via our API.

How are incidents resolved?

Incidents resolve automatically when the underlying checks recover. You can also manually mark an incident as resolved through our website, mobile app, or API.

Can I create custom behavior for handling incidents?

Yes. We can deliver webhooks to an API endpoint of your choosing when incidents are created or resolved.

What kind of collaboration is available during an incident?

We can post to your team’s Slack channel when incidents are created or resolved.

We also provide event logs related to an incident, such as who was paged and who acknowledged the incident.

If your monitor has associated data (such as request/response headers for a website monitor), we’ll include that in the incident display as well, so you can quickly identify the right teammate to help.

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.

Is it easy to silence alerts during an incident?

Yes. Acknowledging an incident stops any alerts from that incident from being delivered to your team.

We also know that when one trigger is alerting, it may be flapping, and it’s likely that other triggers might fire too. That’s why we make it easy to silence all alerts during an incident, at the individual trigger, service-wide, or even organization-wide level.

What if I forget to unsilence alerts after an incident?

This is a big problem with other incident management tools: it’s too easy to unintentionally leave alerts silenced after an incident, causing your team to miss the next outage.

We’ve got you covered: when you silence a trigger/service/organization in HeyOnCall, you click a button with a time period such as “Silence for 24 hours”. When this timeout expires, the trigger/service/organization will automatically be unsilenced.

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 incident management, 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.

Incident management. 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.

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