Guides
How alert escalation and on-call work, written for the person setting them up. Read them in order if you are starting from nothing; each one also stands alone.
- What is alert escalation?
How an alert moves from a monitoring tool to a person, and on to the next person when nobody acknowledges.
- How to design an escalation policy
Levels, waits, targets and repeats in an escalation policy, with example policies, common mistakes and a checklist.
- On-call rotation patterns
Weekly, daily, primary and secondary, and follow the sun: the common on-call rotation patterns and when each fits.
- Incident severity levels
How to define severity levels by user impact, what each level should trigger, and how severity connects to paging.
- What to alert on
Page on symptoms, not causes: the four golden signals, RED and USE, checks from outside, and what makes an alert worth a page.
- Alert fatigue: causes and fixes
Why teams stop trusting their alerts, how to measure the noise, and the fixes: delete, wait, group, inhibit, route by urgency and review.
- Heartbeat and cron job monitoring
How heartbeat monitoring catches cron jobs that silently stop, and how to set the period and grace time.
- SLOs, error budgets and burn-rate alerts
SLIs, SLOs and error budgets, and how multiwindow burn-rate alerts page on real risk to users.
- Incident response basics
What happens after someone acknowledges: declaring an incident, the roles, communication, and the blameless postmortem.
- MTTA, MTTR and other incident metrics
What MTTD, MTTA, MTTR and MTBF measure, where each clock starts and stops, and how to use them without gaming them.
- How to choose an on-call tool
The questions that separate on-call tools: notification methods, schedules, alert sources, pricing, self-hosting, and a short trial plan.