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Paging · Pro+

On-call rotation + escalation policies

Critical incidents shouldn't blast everyone on the workspace at 3 AM. StatusPulse's on-call layer says "the schedule says Alice this week" and only pages Alice — with escalation to Bob if she doesn't ack in 5 minutes, then to the whole Critical-response group if Bob also stays silent.

Why you need it

Six moving pieces, one signal: stop a Critical incident within minutes by paging the one person whose job it is.

  • Schedules. Per-tenant named rotations (Frontend, Database, Weekend) with weekly handoff at a fixed local time. UTC-anchored slot boundaries are DST-immune — handoffs land at the same UTC instant across the spring-forward and fall-back transitions.
  • Escalation policies. A chain of steps attached to a status page. Each step targets a schedule (resolved at fire time), a specific member, or a group; steps run in order with operator-configurable delays between them.
  • Multi-channel paging. Email + SMS today, voice calls (Pro+) + Slack DM + Web Push landing in Phase 2 / 4. Each step can override the member's preferred channel order — "this is Critical, page on voice immediately".
  • Acknowledgement short-circuit. The first member to ack stops the chain — no more "the page woke the entire team and now four people are typing acknowledgements".
  • Audit trail. Every paging attempt writes a PagingEvent row — who, when, which channel, ack status. SOC 2 / ISO 27001 evidence rapidamente exportável via the audit log API.
  • Default fan-out fallback. Tenants that don't configure schedules still get auto-paged on stale Critical / Major incidents — the seeded default policy pages every Owner/Admin, matching pre-rotation behaviour. Zero behaviour change until you opt in.

Where it pays off

The on-call layer pays off the moment one of these happens:

  • 3 AM Critical. A probe goes Down, AI-drafted update buys you a 5-min window, then the escalation sweep fires. The right person gets a phone call (Phase 2); the rest of the team sleeps.
  • Replacing PagerDuty. Series A-B teams paying $10-30 / user / month for PD alone — the StatusPulse Pro tier bundles on-call + status pages + probes at a fraction of that.
  • RFP "do you have on-call?". The checkbox question that used to send buyers back to BetterStack — now it's a green tick on /vs/betterstack.
  • Compliance review. Auditor wants the paging trail. Export the PagingEvent rows from the audit log API: who got paged on which incident, when, and how long until ack.

Available on Pro+. Already on StatusPulse? See the full config in Help →

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