Beacon

Integrations

On-call Schedules

On-call schedules (Pro) decide who gets paged right now. Create them under Settings → On-call, then point escalation policy steps at a schedule instead of, or as well as, specific people.

Rotations

  • People — the team members who take turns, in order. Add someone twice to give them extra shifts.
  • Daily / weekly — the next person takes over at the handoff time, in the schedule's timezone, every day or every 7 days. Handoffs stay at the same local time when clocks change for daylight saving.
  • Custom — shifts last a fixed number of hours (for example 12 for day/night). These count real elapsed hours, so on a daylight-saving change the local handoff time moves by an hour.
  • First shift — the first person starts at the handoff time on this date. Before then nobody is on call.

Overrides

Use "Add override" when someone covers a shift, for a holiday or a swap. While an override is active, its person is on call instead of the rotation. If overrides overlap, the newest one wins. Start and end times are entered in the schedule's timezone.

Escalation policies

In a status page's escalation policy, each step can "also notify whoever is on call" for a schedule. When the step fires, Beacon looks up who is on call at that moment and adds them to the step's recipients. If the schedule has nobody on call and the step lists no users, owners and admins are notified as before.

How on-call people are notified

  • Email, always.
  • SMS, when the person has verified a mobile number on the On-call page and the workspace is on Pro with an SMS or phone call alert channel. Beacon sends through the Twilio account in the first such channel.
  • A phone call as well, for critical incidents and monitor outages.

On-call texts and calls count towards the same hourly limit per workspace as SMS and phone alert channels.

Calendar feed

Each schedule has a private iCal link with the next 8 weeks of shifts and overrides. Subscribe to it in Google Calendar, Outlook or Apple Calendar. Anyone with the link can see the rota, so use "Reset link" if it leaks.