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On-call

On-call for your whole team, one price

Schedules with rotations and overrides, pages by SMS and phone call with press 1 to acknowledge, and no per-seat fees: Team and Business include unlimited members.

No per-seat fees
Pay per monitor. Everyone can be on call.
Press 1 to acknowledge
Phone pages stop the escalation on a key press.
Rotations and overrides
Layers, handoffs and swaps on one timeline.
Schedules

Rotations that match how your team works

Rotate people by hours, days or weeks with a handoff time you choose, add a weekend layer on top, and override for holidays and swaps.

  • Layers limited to certain days or hours
  • Overrides for swaps and holidays
  • Daylight saving safe handoffs
  1. Kestrel
  2. Alerting
  3. On-call
  4. Primary on-call
On call now
Lena Visser
Next handoff
Sam Okafor
Mon 26 Oct, 09:00

Timeline

The final row is who gets paged.

Sat 24Sun 25Mon 26Tue 27Wed 28Thu 29Fri 30
WeeklyLayer 1LVLVSOSOPRPRLV
Final scheduleWho gets pagedLVLVSOSOPRMNLV
Lena VisserSam OkaforPriya RamanOverride: Mila Novak
Paging

Pages that wake you up, and let you go back to sleep

Each person chooses email plus an SMS or a phone call. The call reads the alert out; press 1 and the escalation stops.

  • Press 1 to acknowledge
  • Acknowledge buttons in Slack and Telegram
  • Every acknowledgement attributed to a person
Incoming call · Spectate

“Critical alert for Kestrel. Checkout API is down. Press 1 to acknowledge.”

123456789
Escalation stopped, alert acknowledged13:06
Escalation

Paged by the escalation path, at the moment it fires

Spectate works out who is on call when the step runs, so a handoff mid-incident pages the right person. Nobody acknowledges? The next step runs.

  • Unacknowledged pages escalate
  • Gaps in the schedule never stall an alert
  1. Kestrel
  2. Alerting
  3. Database escalation
Add stepNotifyOn-callIncidentBranch
Trigger
Alert fired
Alert enters this path
Step 1 · Notify+0m
#ops-alerts
Slack
Branch
  • Ifwithin working hours
  • orseverity is critical
Yes
Step 2 · On-call+0m
Database on-call
Now: Priya Raman
No
Step 3 · On-call09:00
Database on-call
Waits for 09:00
Step 4 · Incident+15m
Create incident
If still firing
In detail

Everything in on-call

Who's on call now

And when the next handoff is, per schedule.

Your on-call

Members see their shifts and set their own paging method.

2-week timeline

Shifts per person, with exact times on hover.

SMS and voice credits

50 a month on Team, 200 on Business.

Credit packs

100 credits for €19 that never expire.

Unlimited members

As many people on call as you need.

On the Team and Business plans. See pricing

FAQ

On-call: questions

How much does on-call cost in Spectate?

On-call is part of the Team and Business plans, which include unlimited members. You pay per monitor, not per person: Team costs €0.60 per monitor a month with a minimum of 80, so €48 a month, and Business €0.50 with a minimum of 250. Prices exclude VAT and include a monthly allowance of SMS and voice credits.

Is Spectate cheaper than PagerDuty for on-call?

For most teams, yes, because Spectate doesn't charge per responder. Tools such as PagerDuty, incident.io and Better Stack price on-call per user, so the bill grows with every engineer in the rotation. In Spectate the price depends on how many monitors you have, and everyone on the team can be on call.

How does Spectate page the person on call?

By email, plus an SMS or a phone call to the person's own number, whichever they choose in their profile. The phone call reads the alert out and asks them to press 1 to acknowledge, which stops the escalation. If nobody acknowledges, the escalation path continues with its next step.

Can I set up weekly rotations with overrides?

Yes. Rotation layers hand off every set number of hours, days or weeks at a time you choose, in the schedule's time zone. Layers can be limited to certain days or hours, and overrides replace whoever is scheduled for a period, for example during a holiday or a swap.

What happens if nobody is on call?

If a schedule has a gap when an on-call step fires, Spectate skips to the next step of the escalation path right away and logs the reason, so the alert still reaches someone, for example a team channel or a second schedule.

Can I acknowledge alerts without opening the dashboard?

Yes. Press 1 during a phone page, or use the Acknowledge button on alerts in Slack or Telegram. Acknowledgements are attributed to your Spectate account, and the messages update to show who acknowledged and when. Replying to an SMS is not supported.

Know about it first.

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