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Get started as an On-call responder
Get started as an On-call responder

Get ready for your first On-call shift with incident.io

George Mabey avatar
Written by George Mabey
Updated over 2 months ago

Being on-call is a critical responsibility, and we’re here to make sure you're fully prepared. This quick guide will help you get set up with the right configuration and easily manage your on-call shifts in the future!

How to set up

When you’re invited to be an on-call responder, you’ll receive an email from us. After that, it’s time to set everything up!

Here’s what we recommend:

1️⃣ Download the mobile app
2️⃣ Check your notification settings
3️⃣ Learn how to request cover and create overrides
4️⃣ Know how to acknowledge (ack) when you get paged


1️⃣ Downloading the mobile app

  1. To get started, download our app from your phone’s app store:

  2. Once the app is installed:

    • Sign in

    • Enable push notifications

    • Enable critical alerts

    • Verify your phone number

  3. Discover the app

    Explore the app to get familiar with these key features:

    • View incidents and escalations

    • See your schedules

    • Test notification sounds

After you have enabled all permissions, we create sensible defaults in your notification settings. These are


High Urgency

  • Immediately via App and Slack/MS teams

  • After 1 minute via phone

  • After 3 minutes via SMS

  • After 5 minutes via email

Low Urgency

  • Immediately via email and Slack/MS teams

2️⃣ Checking your notification settings

Want to customize your notifications? You can easily adjust the order of how you get alerted by going to Preferences in the web dashboard.

You can also add more contact methods and change how you want to be notified about upcoming shifts.

3️⃣ Request cover and create overrides

Managing your shifts is simple through the web dashboard, mobile app, or Slack/MS Teams.

  • Create an override to swap out your scheduled shift

  • Send a cover request to ask another team member to cover your shift

Read more about managing schedules, overrides and cover requests here!

4️⃣ Acking a page

When you receive a page, you can acknowledge it through any method. This lets you jump straight to the incident channel and start investigating.

If you have multiple escalations for related issues, you can bulk acknowledge them in the mobile app.

Read more about bulk and auto acking here

Other useful commands

  • /inc or /incident - Creates a new incident

  • /inc cover me - Create a cover request for your shift

  • /inc override - Override a shift in your schedule

  • /inc whoisoncall - See who is on-call

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