PagerDuty

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Do not build this if somebody is genuinely on call. Waking a person up reliably is the product.

A rota with escalation, overrides and acknowledgement is buildable. What is not is the delivery: a phone call that rings through a silent switch, retried across channels until somebody answers, from infrastructure that is not yours. That last clause matters — if your alerting depends on the systems that are down, you will not hear about it.

WHEN TO KEEP PAYING
- Anybody carrying a pager. The cost of one missed outage exceeds a year of the subscription
- Several teams with different rotas, or an escalation that has to reach a manager at four in the morning

WHEN TO BUILD
- One or two people, and email plus a push notification is enough to wake them. The shape is under Better Stack elsewhere in this catalogue

IF YOU BUILD IT, THESE DECIDE WHETHER IT WORKS
- **A materialised shifts table**, computed from the rotation, so 'who is on call right now' is one indexed lookup rather than a calculation at the worst moment
- Daylight saving must not create an hour with nobody on call. Write that test
- A schedule preview for the next month and a warning when a gap exists — a rota with a hole is discovered at three in the morning
- Overrides for illness and holidays, addable by anybody, visible to everybody
- Escalation with every step recorded and its delivery result, and acknowledgement from the notification itself with no login
- Deduplication, so one bad deploy produces one incident rather than nine hundred
- **A test page on demand**, so everybody has proved their own notifications work before they are needed. Most people have never checked

THE TWO RULES THAT OUTRANK THE SOFTWARE
- The alerting path must not depend on what it is watching, including your mail server. Use a different provider for pages
- A dead-man's switch on the alerting system itself, pinging an external service, because a crashed pager looks exactly like a quiet night

AND THE THING THAT REDUCES PAGES MORE THAN ANY TOOL
Delete every alert nobody acts on. An on-call rota that fires eleven times a night trains people to ignore it, and that is a worse failure than having no rota at all.

THE ONE-LINE VERSION
Buy the phone call. Whatever you use, test your own notifications and delete the alerts nobody acts on.