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Urgent escalation

Page your on-call team through PagerDuty, incident.io, Splunk On-Call or Pushover when a caller has an emergency.

Urgent escalation raises an alert in the on-call tool you already use whenever a caller or messenger says it's urgent. Whoever your rota says is on call gets paged, and the alert has the person's number and what they said, so they can call straight back.

What happens

• PagerDuty, incident.io or Splunk On-Call: an alert is raised in your service, and that tool pages whoever its schedule says, the way it always does.
• Pushover: an emergency alert with a siren sound, repeated every 30 seconds, 1 minute or 5 minutes (your choice under Repeat the alert every) until someone acknowledges it, for up to an hour.

Under What to escalate choose Urgent calls and messages, or Urgent calls and unhappy customers. Under When choose Any time, or Only when you're closed (outside the opening hours in your settings).

What you need

Choose Escalate through, then:

• PagerDuty: in PagerDuty, Services, then your service, then Integrations, then Add integration, then Events API V2. Copy the Integration Key into PagerDuty integration key. Choose a Severity: Critical, Error or Warning.
• incident.io: On-call, then Alerts, then Sources, then New source, then HTTP. The incident.io alert source ID is the last part of the address it shows; the incident.io alert source token is the Bearer token on the same page.
• Splunk On-Call (VictorOps): Integrations, then REST – Generic. Copy the address into Splunk On-Call REST endpoint, replacing $routing_key at the end with your routing key.
• Pushover (emergency alerts): at pushover.net, Your Applications, then Create an Application, for the Pushover application token. Then your Pushover user or group key. A delivery group key alerts everyone in the group.

Setting it up

1. Open Plugins, choose Urgent escalation and click Switch on.
2. Choose Escalate through and fill in the boxes for it.
3. Choose What to escalate and When.
4. Click Save and test.

The test won't wake anyone. PagerDuty and incident.io receive a test alert that's resolved straight away, Splunk On-Call gets an information-only alert, and Pushover gets an ordinary notification without the siren.

Cost

Free. Your on-call tool's own subscription is between you and them.

Privacy

The alert includes the person's phone number, how they got in touch, and up to 500 characters of what they said. It's held in your on-call tool under its rules.

Limits

• Urgent means the caller said so, or described an emergency. Your receptionist decides from what they say.
• Only when you're closed follows your weekly opening hours. It doesn't know about one-off closures from Closures and holidays.
• One service at a time.
• If your on-call tool refuses an alert, the plugin shows Needs attention with the reason. The alert isn't sent again, so keep Team alerts or Email notifications on as well if you rely on this.
• For a simple text or call to whoever is on call, without an on-call tool, see On-call rota.

Still stuck? Write to hello@callscovered.ai with your business name and what you were trying to do, and a person will reply.