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On-call escalation stack: which guide to open first

Devotel Orbit’s on-call surface is three guides that each own one sub-task. None of them duplicates the others, but nothing helps until you open the right one. This page is the router: it picks the guide for the ask, then walks one rotation end-to-end across all three.

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Pick the right guide

The supervisor-ladder handoff is in the runbook: a step whose target is a users list (named responders and supervisors) rather than a live rotation. Four-eye-style approvals are a different lane — see the two-officer approvals guide — but the “page the supervisor on shift” step belongs in your escalation policy, and the runbook is where that policy tuning lives.

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One rotation, three guides — the worked example

Walk one rotation from nothing to rehearsed, using each guide once:
  1. Configure the trigger. In the alerting guide define the rotation (anchor, cadence, ordered members) and resolve it to confirm who holds the pager now and who is next. That is your trigger: an ordered roster the escalation policy can point at.
  2. Define the ladder. In the runbook chain the steps: rotation target over push/sms on the early steps, a users fallback (your supervisor) over voice on the late step, explicit escalate_after_seconds windows, and a repeat count for the whole policy to loop. Preview the flattened timeline before an incident depends on it.
  3. Run a drill. In the deep dive open the dashboard hub (Voice → On-call & escalation), open a test incident, and walk acknowledge, resolve, and the negative paths (409 incident_transition_invalid on an ack of a resolved incident) until the sequence runs clean.
  4. Close the loop. Wire the same four endpoints (resolve, escalation/plan, incident/tick, incident/transition) into your scheduler against your own incident store — you own persistence on every on-call endpoint, and each page fans out through the Messages API.
When the drill sequence and the live scheduler agree, the rotation is live; revisit whichever guide owns the sub-task you are changing, not all three.

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When the runbook is the wrong page

If you are wiring a contact center for the first time — softphones, queues, agent login, the whole surface — the on-call runbook is not the answer. First-time contact-center setup follows the voice go-live checklist, which sequences the wiring end-to-end; on-call escalation is a dispatch layer you attach after that surface is up. The reverse also holds: when a live incident needs a human paged, the checklist is the wrong page and this trio is the right one.

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See also