On-Call Management Overview

On-Call Management

1. What it is

On-Call Management lets you organize who is responsible for responding to urgent issues, when they are responsible, and how they get notified. You create pools of on-call staff, schedule rotations so coverage cycles automatically, and activate incidents that page the right people through in-app notifications, push, email and SMS — and, on high and critical incidents nobody acknowledges, a voice call.

• Enablement: On-Call Management requires a license. An admin enables it from Admin → Apps → All Apps; it is off by default.
• What it is not: On-Call Management handles incident paging and response tracking. It does not replace your regular shift scheduling — on-call shifts are separate from work shifts, even though both appear on the schedule.

2. Standing it up

1. Go to Admin → Apps → All Apps → On-Call and enable the app.
2. Go to On-Call → Settings and set the Default Response Time SLA, Notify Management By Default, and Require Resolution Notes toggles to match your policy.
3. Go to On-Call → Pools and create at least one pool. Give it a name, choose a location (or leave it as All Locations), and set the Response Time SLA and Minimum Staff Required for that pool.
4. Enable staff for on-call duty. On the pool page, open the Manage Staff modal and enable the employees who should be eligible for on-call shifts. New employees are not available for on-call by default — you must enable each person.
5. Create a rotation. From the pool, go to Shifts → Create Rotation. Choose a date range, a shift duration, and assign staff. The system creates round-robin shifts automatically: one primary per slot, cycling through your staff list in order. If you designate backup staff, one backup is also assigned per slot.
6. Confirm it worked. Return to Operations (the dashboard). You should see the pool listed with its currently on-call staff. On a phone, your on-call employees see the same status on the mobile On-Call screen.

What silently does nothing until a second thing is configured: creating a pool alone does not put anyone on call. You must also enable at least one person for on-call duty and create a rotation (or a manual shift) before the pool has live coverage.

3. How it fits together

Pool — a named team responsible for a category of incidents (e.g. “IT Support On-Call” or “Emergency Response”). Each pool can be tied to a specific location or cover All Locations. A pool carries its own Response Time SLA, Minimum Staff Required, and management notification preference. You can have as many pools as you need.

Rotation — a date range of automatically generated on-call shifts within a pool. When you create a rotation, you pick the start date, end date, shift duration (in hours), and the staff who participate. The system builds round-robin coverage: for a pool with three primary staff and 24-hour shifts, Staff A covers day 1, Staff B day 2, Staff C day 3, then back to Staff A. If you later extend the rotation, the cycle continues where it left off.

Shift — a single on-call time block. Rotations generate shifts automatically, but you can also create one-off shifts manually. Each shift has a primary/backup designation and a priority number. Everyone on call at the moment of a page is paged at once; backup and priority only order the names on screen.

Worked example: You create a pool called “Night IT Support” at the Downtown location. You enable three employees — Alex, Jordan, and Sam — for on-call duty, then create a rotation from August 1–14 with 24-hour shifts. The system creates 14 shifts: Alex on Aug 1, Jordan on Aug 2, Sam on Aug 3, Alex on Aug 4, and so on. If you extend the rotation by 7 days, Sam picks up Aug 15 (continuing the cycle), then Alex on Aug 16, etc.

Incident (activation) — what happens when someone triggers the pool. An activation pages the currently on-call staff, tracks their responses, records an activity timeline with comments, and stays open until someone resolves it. Each incident has a severity — Low, Medium, High, or Critical — and a status that moves from Active → Acknowledged → Resolved (or Cancelled).

Handoff note — a message the outgoing on-call person leaves for the incoming one. Each pool shows one active handoff note at a time; posting a new one supersedes the previous. Anyone currently on call for the pool, or any on-call manager, can post or clear a note.

Incident links — you can link related incidents together as Related or Duplicate. Links are bidirectional and visible from both incidents.

Escalation — when escalation is enabled, high- and critical-severity incidents keep paging through a multi-step cascade: the first step goes to everyone on call at once, and later steps follow until someone acknowledges. Each step defines which channels fire (in-app, email, SMS, voice) and how long the system waits for an acknowledgement before advancing to the next step. On-Call Management can use the organization’s default escalation policy or override it with an on-call-specific policy configured in Settings → Escalation Policy. Important: if you turn on the on-call-specific override and then turn Enable Escalation off within it, that disables escalation for on-call incidents entirely — it does not fall back to the organization default.

Roles and permissions — who can do what is governed by scoped capabilities, not just the organization role:

• View — any user who can see the pool’s location can view pools, shifts, and incidents. Pools set to All Locations are visible to everyone.
• Manage — create/edit pools, rotations, shifts, and enable or disable staff for on-call duty. Location-restricted managers can only manage pools at their assigned locations.
• Activate — trigger an incident. Controlled separately from manage, so you can allow someone to page the team without giving them full pool management.
• Resolve — close an incident. Also controlled separately.
• Analytics — visible to managers and above, and to anyone granted the On-Call “Manage” capability (a delegated on-call manager does not need a manager role).
• Settings — visible to admins and designated app admins.

Notifications — an incident page goes out on every channel the responder can receive, following their notification preferences for On-Call Alerts:

• In-app — always sent for activations (marked urgent, so it bypasses quiet hours).
• Push — sent to the responder’s phone when your organization has push notifications on and their On-Call Alerts preferences allow it.
• SMS — sent if the user has SMS enabled and a verified phone number on file. Includes a deep link to the incident.
• Email — sent as a separate email with the severity level in the subject line.
• Voice call — the last step of the escalation cascade on high and critical incidents, when nobody has acknowledged and the responder has a verified phone number.

The tenant-wide On-Call Event Notifications setting turns off routine on-call notices (rotation and shift assignments, coverage-gap alerts, acknowledgement and resolution updates); it never stops an incident page.

Coverage-gap alerts — a background check runs every 6 hours across all tenants with On-Call enabled. For each active pool, it looks 7 days ahead. If any on-call shift in that window has fewer assigned staff than the pool’s Minimum Staff Required, a rotation leaves an hour with nobody on call, or there are no on-call shifts at all, it sends an in-app notification to owners, admins, managers and anyone granted On-Call Manage who can see the pool. A new gap is announced about once a day; after a week it is repeated about once a week, and after 30 days it stops. Closing the gap (or the gap changing kind) resets that clock.

4. Running it

Activating an incident

1. From the Dashboard, Operations, Pools, a pool’s own page or Incidents, click Activate.
2. Select the pool, choose a severity (Low, Medium, High, or Critical), and describe the issue.
3. The system pages everyone currently on call for that pool — primaries and backups at the same time. The person who raised the incident is not paged about it. If no one else is on call at that moment, it falls back to staff from shifts that ended within the last 24 hours or start within the next 24 hours.
4. If Notify Management on Activation is on for the pool, owners, admins and managers — and anyone granted On-Call Manage — who can see the pool also receive a notification.

Responding to an incident

Paged staff see the incident in their notifications and on the My On-Call tab. They can:

• Acknowledge — takes ownership and stops any running escalation cascade.
• Respond — records availability (“Yes, I can respond” or “No, I’m not available” on desktop; Available or Can’t on a phone), an optional estimated response time, and a note.
• Resolve — closes the incident with resolution notes (required if the admin turned on Require Resolution Notes).

Managing an open incident

Managers (anyone with On-Call Manage) can also transfer an incident to a different pool (which pages that pool’s on-call staff), escalate severity upward, and snooze notifications for a set number of minutes. Anyone who was paged for the incident can add comments to the activity log and link related incidents.

Reviewing analytics

Managers, admins, and anyone holding the On-Call “Manage” capability see the Analytics tab, which shows metrics over the last 90 days: total incidents, mean time to first response, mean time to resolve, SLA compliance percentage, per-pool breakdowns, and a weekly incident trend.

Disabling a staff member from on-call

You can remove someone from on-call eligibility from the pool’s Manage Staff modal. If the person is still assigned to any current or upcoming on-call shift, the system blocks the change and asks you to reassign those shifts first — this prevents silently dropping coverage.

Using industry templates

The Settings tab includes a set of pre-built pool templates organized by industry: General Business, Healthcare, Retail, Hospitality, Manufacturing, Transportation, and Public Safety. Selecting a template creates new pools with names and descriptions appropriate to that industry. Existing pools are not changed.

You can also load industry defaults from Admin → On-Call Settings → Load Industry Defaults.

Using the mobile view

Phone users are automatically redirected to the mobile On-Call screens for pools, incidents, and My On-Call. The mobile view supports acknowledge, respond and resolve, shows linked incidents, and lets you read and write the pool’s handoff note. Transfer, severity escalation, snooze, and comments are available from the desktop view, which is always reachable via the open desktop view link at the bottom of the page.

5. Settings

Organization-level settings

These apply to all pools and are found in two places: Admin → On-Call Settings and the app’s own Settings tab. Both write the same values.

Setting	Default	What it changes
Default Response Time SLA	15 minutes	The SLA pre-filled when creating a new pool. Does not retroactively change existing pools.
Notify Management By Default	On	Whether new pools default to notifying managers on activation.
Require Resolution Notes	Off	When on, the resolve action requires notes before an incident can be closed.
Enable AI Agent	On	Whether users can interact with on-call data through Ask AI.
Enable Industry Templates	On	Whether the industry-template pool builder appears in the Settings tab.

Escalation policy (Settings tab)

Setting	Default	What it changes
Use an on-call-specific escalation policy	Off (inherits the organization default)	Enables a separate escalation configuration for on-call incidents.
Enable Escalation	Copied from the organization policy (on unless an admin turned it off there)	When on, high/critical incidents keep paging step by step after the first page, which reaches everyone on call at once. Turning it off here, with the override on, stops escalation for on-call incidents only.
Severity Gate	High and Critical	Which severity levels trigger the escalation cascade.

Per-pool settings

Set when creating or editing a pool at On-Call → Pools → [pool] → Edit.

Setting	Default	What it changes
Response Time SLA (minutes)	The Default Response Time SLA setting (15 minutes unless changed)	Target response time for this pool. Drives the SLA compliance metric in Analytics and the per-response badge.
Minimum Staff Required	1	The coverage-gap alert job runs every 6 hours and notifies managers when upcoming shifts in the next 7 days have fewer than this number of assigned staff.
Primary On-Call Pool	Off	Shows a Primary badge on the pool. It does not change who is paged, the order pools are listed in, or which pool the Activate dialog picks.
Notify Management on Activation	On	Whether owners, admins, managers and On-Call Manage holders who can see this pool are notified when it is activated.
Active	On	An inactive pool stops appearing in the active-pools list and cannot be activated. Existing incidents remain visible.

6. More help

• On-Call Management FAQ — specific setup, operating, and troubleshooting questions.
• Ask AI — the assistant answers questions about on-call pools, schedules, and incidents from these articles.