Alerting and on-call

Escalation that walks push, SMS, phone call until someone acknowledges, and the semantics that keep a loud night from becoming a chaotic one.

Channels

Push (native iOS app and Apple Watch, currently in TestFlight) and email on every plan. SMS and phone calls from Sentinel, as escalation steps to verified numbers. The full channel table is on alerting and integrations.

The escalation ladder

An incident pages the on-call person by push first; without acknowledgment the ladder walks to SMS and then to a phone call, with stage timings configured per schedule. Calls are capped at 2 per incident: escalation should wake a human, not drain a battery.

Phone number verification

A number must be verified before it can ever be paged: a 6-digit one-time code, valid for 10 minutes, with a 60-second resend cooldown and at most 5 attempts. Paging only ever goes to verified numbers.

Acknowledgment semantics

Acknowledging an incident takes ownership: the escalation stops, every other device quiets down, and reminders go to the owner rather than the whole team. The acknowledgment, like every event, lands on the incident timeline with its timestamp.

On-call schedules

Rotations with escalation stages and a coverage-gap warning when nobody is on duty. On-call, like incident command, is included from Sentinel; the exact gates are on plans and limits.

What alerting is not

No alert AI, no anomaly scores deciding whether you get woken up. An alert means more than one continent confirmed a real failure; the quorum rule is the whole mechanism, and it is stated in one sentence.