Rootly now supports deferred paging. A brand new UX that adds a deferral path to any escalation policy to define when certain alerts should wait instead of page—and exactly what happens when the window ends.
Why it matters
Not every alert that fires at 2am on a Saturday needs to wake someone up. But suppressing it entirely means it might never get seen. The only tools teams have had for this are workarounds: routing low-urgency paths to Slack channels with no deterministic mechanism to resurface them, or just accepting the noise.
Deferred paging gives you a third option:
- Low-urgency alerts arrive, get logged, and appear in Slack—without paging anyone
- Responders rest through the night without alert fatigue
- When business hours start, the alert pages the right on-call path automatically
- Alerts that are acknowledged, escalated, or resolved before the window ends are never re-paged
How it works
Deferral paths sit on escalation policies alongside your existing escalation paths, and are always evaluated first. Each deferral path has a time-based condition—you define the window when paging should be held (nights, weekends, or any custom schedule) and which escalation path fires when that window closes.
When the deferral window ends, the alert is replayed through your escalation policy as if it arrived fresh. If you’ve configured a specific path to activate at business hours, it follows that. If you’ve configured re-evaluation, it picks the best-fit path automatically. Either way, only alerts that are still active get paged—resolved ones are left alone.
Manual pages are never deferred.
Getting started
- Open an escalation policy and add a deferral path.
- Set the time window when paging should be held and the conditions that determine which alerts qualify.
- Choose what happens when the window ends—a specific escalation path, or full re-evaluation.
Deferred paging is now available for all Rootly On-Call customers. Check out the docs to learn more and get started.
