When your product is critical to users, downtime isn’t an option. On-call is how you make sure the right person is always ready to respond. In an on-call schedule, on-call engineers or support specialists take turns being available to act when incidents need human attention.

Getting started with on-call schedules

When an incident happens, Better Stack notifies the current on-call person. Here's how it works in practice:

1. A monitor or an integration triggers an incident.
   
2. The current on-call person is notified first.
   
3. If they don’t acknowledge the incident (for example, after 3 minutes), it escalates and notifies everyone on the team.

Primary on-call schedule

The on-call person in the schedule marked as Primary is notified about new incidents. You can escalate to any schedule using custom escalation policies.

Want to control how incidents are escalated?

Customize every step of the incident escalation flow using advanced escalation policies.

Configure which schedule or specific person should be notified and how to notify them. Add fallback steps, time delays, time-based rules, conditional metadata steps, and more.

Creating an on-call schedule

Start by inviting all team members who’ll take part in on-call.

Step 1: Create your schedule

• Go to Who's on-call in the left menu.
  
• Click Create on-call schedule.
  
• Enter a schedule name. For example, Primary schedule.
  
• Click Continue.

Step 2: Configure the schedule

• Choose colleagues to take turns having on-call.
  
• Choose how often shifts should change. For example, every 1 day.
  
• Adjust when the first shift of the rotation should start if needed.
  

• Check your new schedule in the live preview near the bottom of the page.
• Click Apply changes once everything looks right.

Step 3: Review and manage

After applying changes, the calendar shows all assigned shifts.

You can:

• Check who’s on-call today or later.
  
• Click Configure to reopen configuration and adjust the schedule.
  
• Create one-off on-call overrides.

Creating overrides

Overrides are perfect for quickly stepping in and taking over someone's shift.
Click Create override to change who's on-call without modifying the schedule.

Advanced escalation flows

Easily handle even the most complex on-call setups. Create multiple schedules and combine them in an escalation policy to:

• Set up primary & secondary schedules.
  
• Enable seamless follow-the-sun coverage across time zones.
  
• Tailor escalation policies for individual monitors and integrations.
  

Escalation policies can reference any schedule you’ve created, escalate to specific people and trigger automations via integrations.

Primary & secondary escalation flow

We'll create a Tier 1 schedule that falls back to Tier 2 when the Tier 1 on-call person doesn’t pick up and acknowledge the incident.

• Create Tier 1 schedule: your main rotation for first responders.
  
• Create Tier 2 schedule: your backup rotation, often senior engineers or leads.
  

Then create an escalation policy:

• Go to Escalation policies → Create escalation policy.
  
• In Step 1: select Tier 1 schedule.
  
• Configure Wait for: for example, 15 minutes before further escalation.
  
• In Step 2: select Tier 2 schedule.
  

With this escalation policy, if the Tier 1 responder doesn’t acknowledge within 15 minutes, Better Stack automatically escalates the incident to Tier 2.

Follow-the-sun escalation flow

We'll create three schedules for EU, US West, and Asia/Pacific time zones to ensure 24/7 global coverage.

• Create Schedule for EU: covering Europe working hours.
  
• Create Schedule for US West: covering the West Coast working hours.
  
• Create Schedule for APAC: covering Asia/Pacific working hours.
  

Setting up schedule active hours

Select Schedule active: Specific days and times and configure when the schedule should be active. No one in the schedule will be alerted outside its active hours.

You'll see the alternating schedules and shifts on Who's on-call page:

Once the schedules are in place, create an escalation policy:

• Go to Escalation policies → Create policy.
  
• In Step 1: add all three schedules (EU, US West, APAC).
  Better Stack automatically notifies whoever's on-call in their local region.
  
• Add another step as a fallback in case the regional responders don't acknowledge the incident.

Escalation fallback steps

The escalation continues until someone acknowledges the incident.
Add an extra fallback step to make sure critical incidents are escalated further.
For example, escalate to the team lead or to the entire team after 15 minutes.

This escalation setup provides continuous coverage without night shifts, allowing each region to handle incidents during its normal working hours.

Need help?

Please let us know at hello@betterstack.com.
We're happy to help! 🙏