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

For more complex on-call setups, you can create multiple schedules and combine them in an escalation policy. This allows you to build advanced workflows like:

• Backup schedules to ensure critical incidents always have a fallback.
• Follow-the-sun rotations to cover all time zones globally.

Need help?

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