IT On-Call Management System | OnPage On-Call Management

What's an IT On-Call Management System?

Streamline on-call management – the process of adding members of the engineering staff into after-hours or weekend call schedules.

Assign equitable responsibility for managing IT alerts outside of traditional work hours. Ensure urgent alerts rise above the clutter®

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How On-Call Management Systems Work

An IT on-call management system streamlines the process of adding IT administrators, developers, security operators, or other members of the engineering staff into after-hours or weekend call schedules, assigning them equitable responsibility for managing IT alerts outside of traditional work hours.

Team members are placed into on-call rotations or schedules, and respond to priority outages or disruptions of important technologies. With multiple staff members handling on-call duties, management becomes much easier with effective processes supported by automation.

Effective after-hour policies ensure that individuals share the burden equally in responding to critical incidents that occur on weekends, weeknights and holidays.

OnPage improves on-call management via mobile schedule view that syncs across devices for all users simultaneously

Stressed IT worker suffering from alert fatigue

Signs That Your Team Needs an IT On-Call Management System

Missed Alerts

An important indicator that an IT team needs to have a digital scheduler is when they miss an important alert related to equipment failure, cybersecurity threats or similar critical IT issues.

Since missed alerts can lead to prolonged downtime and lost productivity, businesses often start the process of evaluating digital scheduling solutions after a post-mortem review of the critical incident.

Burnout and Alert Fatigue

Organizations that don’t have an effective on-call rotation policy, risk overburdening and burning out key individuals with after-hours work.

Also, when team members don’t have a way to forward or escalate responsibilities if they need help resolving a particular issue, or if they are already working on assigned tickets and more issues crop up, they experience alert fatigue.

Before organizations risk losing high-performing IT employees, they should consider better on-call management and scheduling.

OnPage's on call management system showing digital on-call schedule on the enterprise management console, OnPage app with role-based messaging capabilities and OnPage high priority alert

How OnPage Helps With On-Call Scheduling

OnPage’s trusted incident alert management platform and smartphone app enable IT teams to effectively work in after-hour rotations and improve on-call management. With OnPage, teams are able to:

Bypass the silent switch on all mobile devices.
Create and manage escalation policies.
Ensure alerts are persistent—Alerts continue for up to 8 hours until acknowledged.
Review audit trails and track messages—Teams can see when messages were SENT, DELIVERED and READ
Ensure that every group gets their preferred, on-call rotation with on-call scheduling for multiple individuals without limitation to location.
Add images and voice attachments to text messages to convey more information, allowing for informed decisions.

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Three Steps to Improving On-Call Scheduling

One of the key goals of on-call is to limit disruption to the end customer. To that end, a pageable alert is only fired when an action must be taken.

Step 1: Create a Fair On-Call Schedule

Use group schedules to make sure everyone gets a chance at bat. Rotations are key in this regard as they ensure everyone is put on-call at some point during a normal schedule.

Moreover, a fair schedule will promote the sense that no one group is being picked on or forced to work more hours than any other.

IT on-call management system, showing the IT support after hours escalation on-call schedule.

Step 2: Make Sure Alerts Are Persistent

How many times has someone on your team said they didn’t respond to an alert because they didn’t hear it?

Most alerting technologies notify engineers via SMS or email and don’t provide persistent, distinguishable alerting mechanisms if the engineer is temporarily out of range.

Instead, make sure you are using a tool that avoids these problems by creating persistent, distinguishable alerts that will rise above the clutter®.

Additionally, make sure the alerts will be heard when the engineer comes back into range.

OnPage's IT On-call management system displaying a new message on smartphone screen

Step 3: Messaging for Efficient Communications

Make sure the on-call communication tools you use enable communications between engineers.

That is, make sure they have the right tool which will enable both alerting and critical communications. Engineers should be able to message fellow engineers as well as groups.

Ideally, your messaging platform will also integrate with widely used industry tools such as Slack.

From Slack, for example, engineers could alert individuals to significant events that need their colleague’s input.

side by side view of OnPage dispatcher and recipient chat on desktop and mobile

Continuous Industry Success

OnPage is a G2 Leader for incident alert management, consistently receiving recognition for high performance and user satisfaction. Read more reviews!

5 Star Positive Testimonial from Scott T, Senior Service Management Engineer that reads

5 Star Positive Testimonial from Bill G, VP of Services that reads

5 Star Positive Testimonial from Ben W, IT Specialist that reads

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Security & Compliance🔒

✅SOC 2 certified facility
✅ISO 27001-certified facility
✅Full redundancy, audited regularly
✅HIPAA compliant
✅Hardware & software failovers
✅PCI certified
✅Pen tested yearly
✅GDPR compliant

✅SOC 2 certified facility
✅ISO 27001-certified facility
✅Full redundancy, audited regularly
✅HIPAA compliant

✅Hardware & software failovers
✅PCI certified
✅Pen tested yearly
✅GDPR compliant

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FAQs
- What does an IT on-call management system do?
  
  An IT on-call management tool helps organizations create and manage fair on call schedules and rotations for their on-call engineers and support teams. It streamlines incident management by ensuring the right team members are always available, whether it’s after-hours, weekends, or holidays, to respond to urgent incidents. With real-time alert management and access to mobile app notifications and on-call schedules, these systems help reduce missed alerts and improve overall performance.
- How does automatic escalation work in on-call management software?
  
  On-call management systems are preconfigured with the team’s on-call schedule, ensuring they are routing incident alerts to the right people, but what happens when an alert goes unacknowledged? Modern on call management solutions are designed to handle it with built-in incident response protocols. The alert is automatically escalated to the next person in the on-call rotation, so nothing slips through the cracks. This ensures fast resolution, even if the primary on call engineer is unavailable during an incident.
- Why is real-time alerting important for on-call teams?
  
  Real-time alerting is critical for any team that requires their staff to take on on-call responsibilities. They must employ an on-call management tool with persistent push notifications and override features that enable them to receive urgent messages instantly, whether or not their phones are on silent. This helps engineers act fast, reduce downtime, and deliver effective incident response (with no delays) during high-pressure moments.
- Who benefits from using IT on call management solutions?
  
  Any team responsible for uptime, whether in DevOps, IT, cybersecurity, site reliability, or managed services, can benefit from on-call management solutions. These systems make it easier to build equitable on call schedules, automate alerting, and manage incident response across global teams. With the right platform, organizations can reduce alert fatigue, improve fairness, and ensure critical issues always get the attention they need.

What's an IT On-Call Management System?