On-call paging

BlameTrail pages your on-call rotation when an incident matches an active escalation policy. Pages can be delivered three ways:

• Browser push — free on every plan. Works in Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari 16.4+ once you enable notifications on a device.
• SMS — included on Starter and Pro. Available for any country; US, Canada, and UK are bundled into the plan price, others are billed at metered rates.
• Voice call (with DTMF acknowledgment) — included on Starter and Pro. The call announces the incident and prompts the on-call to press 1 to acknowledge or 2 to escalate.

Plan availability

* Browser push works at the channel level on every plan, but on-call paging itself requires an escalation policy, which is a Starter feature. In practice, Free plans have no path to dispatch a page.

Pages above the included monthly limit are billed as metered overage. A hard cap of 5× the monthly limit prevents runaway loops from running up your bill — once it's hit, further pages are recorded as skipped until the next month or until you raise the cap with us.

International pricing

US, Canada, and UK are included in the monthly page count at the per-page rate listed above. All other countries are allowed but billed at metered overage with a 30% surcharge to cover higher carrier rates.

Setting up your destinations

1. In Settings → On-call paging, enable Browser push on each device you want to be reachable on.
2. Add a phone number in E.164 format (e.g. +14155551234) and select its country.
3. Click Send verification SMS and enter the 6-digit code. Numbers must be verified before they can receive pages.

A user can keep multiple verified numbers — the first one verified becomes the primary. All verified numbers are paged on every step that has SMS or voice enabled.

Wiring paging into escalation

Open an escalation policy and edit a step. Each step has independent toggles for SMS, Voice, and Push — leave them blank to use the defaults (page on every available channel) or pick a subset.

A common pattern:

Acknowledging via voice

When a voice page reaches you, BlameTrail says:

"BlameTrail page. Severity HIGH. Service api. Auth login failures. Press 1 to acknowledge, or 2 to escalate."

• Press 1 to acknowledge — the incident is set to acknowledged (only when it's still open; if another responder already acknowledged or the incident already resolved, your 1 is recorded but doesn't change incident state). Further escalation steps for this cycle are suppressed.
• Press 2 to skip — the page is recorded as delivered and the next escalation step fires when its delay elapses.
• Don't enter anything — after the prompt times out, the page is treated as unacknowledged and the next step fires.

Storm guardrails

If a single monitor pages more than 10 times in 15 minutes, BlameTrail auto-mutes paging from that monitor for an hour. The monitor still records check failures and incidents — it just stops waking your on-call. The mute is visible on the monitor detail page and clears automatically.

There's also a per-tenant burst limit (60 pages/hour on Starter, 200 on Pro). Pages over the burst limit are recorded as skipped so they show up in audit but don't fan out.