On-call schedules and escalation

Schedules and rotations

Open On-call in the Monitor menu and create a schedule. Give it a name, an IANA timezone such as Asia/Kolkata, and a rotation type:

• •Weekly — one person per week, handing off at a chosen weekday and time.
• •Daily — one person per day, handing off at a chosen time.
• •Custom — fixed-length shifts of a number of hours you set.

Handoffs are computed as wall-clock times in the schedule’s timezone, so a daylight-saving day still counts as one shift. Add participants in order; the rotation cycles through them from the start date. The page shows who is on now and a 14-day coverage strip, and you can reorder people at any time.

Backup layer

A schedule can have a second layer. The person on layer 2 is the secondary and can be paged by an escalation step. If there is no layer 2, the next person in the primary rotation is the secondary.

Overrides

An override says “X covers from this time to that time”. It beats the rotation for its window and is the way to handle holidays and swaps. Members can add overrides for themselves.

Business hours

A schedule can be limited to business hours (days plus start and end time). Outside those hours the escalation policy can point at a different after-hours schedule, which is how a follow-the-sun setup works. Leave business hours off for a 24×7 rotation.

Who gets paged, and how

Each person sets up paging on Account → Profile → Paging (on-call): enter a mobile number, confirm the 6-digit SMS code (valid for 10 minutes), and tick the ways you want to be reached.

An unverified number is never paged. Push to the mobile app is separate and needs no Twilio.

Connect your Twilio

Paging uses your own Twilio account (bring your own key). On the On-call page, enter the Account SID, auth token, an SMS-capable from number, and optionally a voice number and a WhatsApp sender, then send a test. The credentials are stored encrypted. Opservo verifies Twilio’s signature on the “press 1” callback, so an unsigned request can never acknowledge a page.

Escalation policy

The policy is a list of up to 8 steps. Each step says: after how many minutes, who to notify (the on-call primary, the backup/secondary, or a specific person), and by which ways (email, SMS, WhatsApp, phone call).

Every 60 seconds Opservo looks at each unacknowledged critical alert and each open critical incident. For every step whose delay has elapsed it pages the target once, and only once. As soon as someone acknowledges — in the dashboard, from the mobile app, or by pressing 1 on the call — escalation stops for that alert or incident. Every attempt, its outcome and any provider error is listed in Page history.

A policy with no steps falls back to the simpler mode: repeat unacknowledged criticals every N minutes up to a maximum, then email one on-call address after a threshold.

Incidents and on-call

When an incident is declared it is assigned automatically to the default schedule’s primary. The incident drawer also has Page on-call now for a manual page.

Importing from PagerDuty or OpsGenie

Paste a PagerDuty schedule export (its schedule_layers) or an OpsGenie rotation export on the On-call page. Click Preview to see the rotation Opservo will create, then Import. People are matched by email; anyone not in your workspace is listed for you to invite, and nothing creates a user. Your existing outbound PagerDuty and OpsGenie notification channels keep working alongside.