Get started with on-call

On-call is the practice of always having a team member on standby, ready to respond in case of an urgent incident, even if it occurs outside of the regular working hours. It’s one of the core aspects of Incident Management as well as being the key to minimizing downtime and ensuring a reliable service.

On-call schedule is a dedicated calendar allowing teams to assign and monitor shifts.

How on-call alerting works in Uptime

When an incident happens and no one is currently on-call, we notify every team member.

Below, we can see the example incident flow for a monitor configured to alert every team member after 3 minutes if the current on-call person doesn't acknowledge the incident.

Creating an on-call rotation schedule using a calendar

Before starting with the on-call calendar setup, it's ideal to have already invited all team members that will have on-call duties. If you have your team set up in Uptime, then let's create your first on-call calendar!

Step 1: Naming your on-call calendar

• Go to Who's on-call → Add on-call calendar.
• Name your on-call calendar (for example: "Main calendar").

Step 2: Creating an on-call rotation

• Scroll down to Pre-fill calendar rotations and select the team members that will rotate the on-call duty.
• Select the rotation length (it can be anything from a day to multiple weeks).
• Then select the starting date and time for the on-call rotation to be pre-filled in the calendar.
• Once that's done, the changes will auto-save.

Common on-call rotation setups

• Daily rotations mean that the on-call person changes after 24 hours
• Weekly rotations mean that on-call person changes each week

Step 3: Checking the on-call duties

Now, you can check the current on-call person's details, like email or phone number, or look up future on-call duties.

Next steps to enhance your on-call 🏎

• Start sending your incident alerts to Slack or Microsoft Teams.
• Set up escalation policies to customize alerting to fit your on-call work-flow perfectly.