Rotations with a primary and a secondary. Escalation after a wait you set. Pages by SMS, voice call, and Slack. Open incidents from your monitoring, from Slack, or from a script.
One schedule. One escalation path. One place to see who is on point.
On-call management is how a team decides who answers when production breaks, and how the problem reaches that person. It has three parts: a schedule that names a responder for every hour, an escalation policy for when that responder does not answer, and paging channels that interrupt a person, not a dashboard.
Most teams start with a spreadsheet and a Slack channel. That works until the one person who reads the channel is asleep. The fix is a rotation that computes itself, a wait that expires on its own, and a phone that rings.
OrgOrg's On-Call app schedules the rotation with a primary and a secondary, escalates after a wait you set, and pages by SMS and voice call through Twilio. Incidents open from an API call, a Google Cloud Monitoring alert, the /oncall command in Slack, or the web app. Every step lands on one incident timeline.
The schedule, the escalation, the page, and the record.
Rotations
Pick a daily or weekly cadence, a handoff day and time, a timezone, and the order of people. OrgOrg fills the calendar with a primary and a secondary for every slot, as far ahead as you want to see.
Escalation
Set how many minutes to wait. An unacknowledged page moves from the primary to the secondary, then up the primary's manager chain from the org chart, or along a custom path you define.
SMS and voice pages
Pages go out by SMS and voice call through Twilio. Reply to the text to acknowledge, or press 1 on the call. Reply 'pass' or press 2 to hand the page to the next person in line.
Engineering primary: API 5xx rate above 2%. Reply to acknowledge, or reply "pass" to escalate.
You: on it
"Press 1 to acknowledge, or press 2 to pass this to the next in line."
Overrides and swaps
Swap the primary or secondary for one slot, add an ad-hoc shift with its own start and end, or skip a slot altogether. The rotation rule stays intact underneath.
Open incidents from anywhere
Open an incident with a bearer-token API call, a Google Cloud Monitoring alert webhook, the /oncall command in Slack, or a button in the web app. Repeat messages fold into the open incident instead of paging twice.
curl -X POST https://orgorg.com/api/v1/oncall/page \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $ONCALL_TOKEN" \
-d '{"message":"API 5xx rate above 2%"}'Paste the webhook URL into a notification channel. An open alert pages. A closed alert clears.
/oncall checkout is timing out
The incident timeline
An incident is a timeline, not a ticket. The alert that opened it, each page and the channel it went out on, the escalation and why, the acknowledgement and who gave it, the notes, and the clear. Each event carries its channel: SMS, voice, Slack, API, or web.
The same timeline posts to the rotation's Slack channel as it grows, so the people who are not on call can follow along without anyone typing a status update. The person who reported the incident gets a text when it is picked up.
API 5xx rate above 2%. Opened by API.
SMS and voice call to the primary.
No acknowledgement after 5 minutes. Paged the secondary.
Pressed 1 on the voice call. Posted to #incidents.
Rolled back the 10:15 deploy. Error rate back under 0.1%.
Alert closed upstream. Incident resolved.
Why on-call needs a system
The failure mode of informal on-call is not a missed alert. It is an alert that three people saw and nobody owned. A system names one person, gives them a clock, and knows who comes next.
One name, not a channel
Every incident has an on-point person from the second it opens. The primary, then the secondary, then the chain. Nobody has to ask 'is someone on this?' because the timeline says who.
The clock does the nagging
Set the wait once. If a page goes unacknowledged, the next phone rings without a human deciding to escalate. And it stops on its own: the chain ends, or ten escalations, or 24 hours, and the incident is marked Unresolved and stays visible.
The org chart is the backup plan
The people directory and org chart live in the same suite. When the primary and secondary are both silent, the page climbs the primary's manager chain, with no second directory to keep in sync.
Four steps. About 20 minutes. The first test page tells you it works.
Name it, choose daily or weekly, set the handoff day and time, and order the people. OrgOrg schedules the primary and secondary for every slot.
Choose the wait in minutes and the path: the primary's manager chain from the org chart, or a custom list of people.
Create a bearer token for the API, paste the webhook URL into Google Cloud Monitoring, and pick a Slack channel for incident updates.
Fire a test incident from the web app. Your phone rings, you press 1, and the Slack channel shows the acknowledgement.
The core of on-call in a suite, or the full incident platform.
| Capability | OrgOrg |  |
|---|---|---|
| On-call schedules and rotations | ||
| Primary and secondary responders | ||
| Escalation policies | ||
| Overrides and shift swaps | ||
| SMS and voice paging | ||
| Slack notifications | ||
| Event deduplication and noise reduction | Same-message dedup only | Event intelligence |
| Monitoring tool integrations | API + Google Cloud Monitoring | Marketplace of hundreds |
| Runbook automation | ||
| Public status page in the same suite | Status app included | Sold as an add-on |
| Bundled with profiles, org chart, go links, feedback… | 20+ apps in one suite | On-call platform only |
| Pricing model | Flat suite price | Per user |
The language of rotations, escalation, and paging.
On-call management is the practice of naming who responds to production problems at any given hour, and how a problem reaches that person. It covers the schedule (who is on call and when), the escalation policy (what happens when nobody answers), and the paging channels (SMS, voice call, Slack). OrgOrg's On-Call app handles all three in one place.
A rotation has a cadence (daily or weekly), a handoff day and time, a timezone, and an ordered list of people. OrgOrg computes every shift from that rule, with a primary and a secondary responder for each slot. You can change the cadence going forward without rewriting the past, and you can end a rotation on a set date.
Each rotation has an escalate-after wait in minutes (the default is five). If the on-point person has not acknowledged the page when the wait ends, OrgOrg pages the next person and starts the clock again. The chain runs primary, then secondary, then the primary's manager chain from the org chart, or a custom path you define. You can also turn escalation off for a rotation.
By SMS and a voice call to the phone number on your profile, through Twilio. A rotation can be set to SMS only. Incident updates also post to the Slack channel you attach to the rotation, and the person who reported the incident gets a text when it is picked up, escalated, or reassigned.
Reply to the text message, press 1 on the voice call, or click Acknowledge in the web app. To hand the page to the next person instead, reply 'pass' or press 2. Every action is recorded on the incident timeline with its channel, so the record shows who took the page and how.
Create a bearer token for the rotation and POST a message to the on-call API. For Google Cloud Monitoring, paste the rotation's webhook URL into a notification channel: an open alert pages the rotation, and a closed alert clears the incident. From Slack, type /oncall. From the web app, click Page. A repeat of the same message joins the open incident instead of opening a second one.
Yes. Override the primary or the secondary for a single slot, add an ad-hoc shift with any start and end (a deploy window, a holiday evening), or skip a slot. Overrides sit on top of the rotation rule, so the underlying schedule is unchanged. When a shift changes hands, the people coming on and going off get a text, and the Slack channel gets a post.
OrgOrg keeps escalating until the chain runs out, then marks the incident Unresolved and stops paging. The same happens after ten escalations or after 24 hours of alerting. An Unresolved incident stays open and visible until a person clears it. Nothing pages forever, and nothing disappears.
PagerDuty is the incident response platform: event deduplication, noise reduction, runbook automation, hundreds of monitoring integrations, and a per-user price. OrgOrg's On-Call app covers the core (rotations, escalation, a pager that rings, Slack updates) inside a flat-priced suite that also holds your people directory, org chart, and status page. If incident response is a core discipline for you, PagerDuty is the deeper product. If you need a reliable rotation without a platform bill, OrgOrg is the simpler one.
On-Call is part of the OrgOrg suite: one flat price for every app. The Free plan includes 100 SMS or voice pages a month, and the Pro plan includes 1,000. Slack and web pages are never counted. See the pricing page for the current plans.
Yes. Link a service on your status page to the rotation that covers it. When that rotation is paged, OrgOrg opens a status incident on the linked services, so your public page reflects the problem while your team works it. Both apps are in the same suite.
Everyone in the org. The on-call page lists every rotation with its current primary and secondary, and the New Tab dashboard shows the same at a glance. The list API returns the current on-call for scripts and bots.
Free to start · No credit card · 100 pages a month on Free