On-Call Scheduling
On‑call rotation schedules with business hours, escalations, and reliable alert delivery. Integrated with monitoring, without brittle glue.
On‑call rotation schedules:
Make it easy to share the responsibility with an easy-to-edit on-call schedule. Assign responsibility for different services to different on-call schedules.
Integrated monitoring and alerting:
Built-in monitoring for websites, APIs, cron jobs, SSL certificates, Prometheus, Datadog, and more.
Critical Alerts use special phone permissions to bypass Do Not Disturb, silent/vibrate modes, and volume settings. They’re loud and impossible to ignore, and will repeat until acknowledged.
Escalations:
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.
Business hours schedules:
But not everything needs to wake your team up at 3am! Non‑critical alerts are regular push notifications. 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 easy on-call scheduling, escalation rules, Critical Alerts, configurable severities, and business hours schedules, our service helps your team deliver reliability while avoiding burnout.
On‑Call Scheduling: HeyOnCall vs. Alternatives
| Differentiator |
HeyOnCall
|
Alternatives |
|---|---|---|
| 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. |
| 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)_/¯ |
| Escalations | Automatic escalation of unacknowledged incidents to other teammates. Easy to configure with customizable delays, retries, and multiple levels until acknowledged. | ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ |
| Business hours schedules | Defer important-but-not-urgent alerts 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. |
On‑Call Scheduling FAQ
How do on-call rotations work?
On-call rotations determine who is on-call for a given service at a given time.
Defining an on-call rotation is as simple as defining a rotation schedule and a list of users to rotate through.
Rotation schedules are defined in a human-readable text format that is timezone-aware and can be defined in a way that works for your team. This includes common patterns like: weekly shifts, daily shifts, shifts that span multiple days, and the flexibility to define more complex schedules.
Can I edit, swap, or trade shifts?
Yes. The rotation schedule is like a template. But it's easy to manually assign a shift to a different user, or edit the shift to be longer or shorter, without having to re-define the entire rotation schedule.
Can I have multiple on-call schedules?
Yes. Multiple services can be assigned to the same on-call rotation, and a user can be assigned to multiple on-call rotations.
Logically, services typically map to a logical subsystem, while an on-call rotation maps to a team.
Most teams start with just one service, something like “Application”, and a single on-call rotation, such as “Engineering”.
As your product grows, you might split into separate services, such as “Data Pipeline” and “Marketing Website” and “SSL Certificates”. As your team grows, you might divide responsibility into separate on-call rotations, such as “Platform Team”, “Product Team”, and “Data Team”.
HeyOnCall makes it easy to start simple with a single on-call rotation, while being flexible to support growing with your team.
Are there calendar integrations?
Yes. We publish per-rotation or per-user iCalendar feeds, which can be added to your Google Calendar or Outlook. These feeds update automatically when shifts are changed.
A team manager might want to see a calendar of all on-call shifts for a given rotation, while a user might want to see only their assigned shifts.
The full schedule of upcoming shifts is also available through our mobile app or website without requiring any external calendar integration.
Can I get Slack notifications when an on-call shift begins?
Yes. For coordination and visibility, we can post to your team’s Slack channel when on-call responsibility hands off to someone new.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 on-call schedules, website monitoring, API monitoring, heartbeat monitoring, and alert delivery in one product, which removes fragile links and makes the overall system more reliable.
On-call schedules. Mobile apps. Critical alerts. 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.