Incidents & On-Call

On-Call Rotation

A scheduled rotation of engineers who are responsible for responding to alerts outside business hours. Sustainable rotations are weekly and shared across at least 4–5 people.

Source

Google SRE Book — Being On-Call

Related terms

Incident

An unplanned event that disrupts service or threatens to.

Severity (SEV-1 to SEV-4)

A standardized scale for how serious an incident is.

Incident Commander (IC)

The single person who owns coordination of an incident end-to-end.

Tech Lead (during incident)

The engineer actively diagnosing and fixing the problem during an incident.

Comms Lead

Owns customer-facing communication during an incident — status page updates, in-product banners, support te…

Escalation Policy

Rules that decide who gets paged next if the primary on-call doesn't acknowledge within a timeout.

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The Free plan includes 5 monitors with HTTP and Ping checks from 3 of the 4 probe regions, 5 minute intervals, and email alerts — $0, no credit card, commercial use allowed. Hosted status pages and the fourth region start on Starter ($16/mo); all 8 monitor types unlock on Growth ($40/mo).

HTTP + Ping checks

3 of 4 probe regions (all 4 on paid plans)

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