A backup on-call schedule ensures that if the primary on-call person doesn't acknowledge an incident, a secondary person or team is automatically notified. This creates a safety net for critical incidents, making your on-call process more resilient.

This guide explains how to set up a primary (L1) and backup (L2) escalation flow.

Step 1: Create two on-call schedules

First, you'll need two separate on-call schedules. If you haven't created them yet:

1. Go to Who's on-call and click Create on-call schedule.
2. Create a Primary/L1 schedule for your first responders.
3. Create a second Secondary/L2 schedule for your backup rotation (e.g., senior engineers or team leads).

For a detailed walkthrough on creating schedules, see the getting started with on-call guide.

Step 2: Create an escalation policy

Next, create an escalation policy that defines the handoff from L1 to L2.

1. Go to Escalation policies and click Create escalation policy.
2. Name your policy something clear, like Primary with L2 backup.
3. In the first step, under Who should we alert?, select your Primary/L1 schedule.
4. Click Add another step.
5. In the second step, set a delay. For example, Wait for 15 minutes before escalating to.
6. Under Who should we alert? in this second step, select your Secondary/L2 schedule.
7. Click Create escalation policy.

With this policy, if the L1 responder doesn’t acknowledge an incident within 15 minutes, Better Stack automatically escalates it to the L2 schedule.

Step 3: Assign the policy to your monitors

Finally, apply this escalation policy to your critical monitors to put the backup flow into action.

1. Go to Monitors, select a monitor, and click Configure.
2. In the monitor's settings, find the Escalation policy section.
3. Select your Primary with L2 backup policy from the dropdown menu.
4. Click Save changes.