How do I know who is on call right now and escalate if they miss an alert?

To know who is on call right now and how to escalate if they miss an alert, the best approach is to use your on-call/incident tool’s schedule + escalation policy.

1) Find the current on-call person

In most tools (PagerDuty, Opsgenie, etc.) you can:

• Open the schedule or on-call roster
• View the current time slot
• See the primary on-call and often a secondary / backup

If you have an internal system, look for:

• “On call now”
• “Current shift”
• “Duty schedule”
• “Escalation policy”

2) Check the escalation path

An escalation policy usually defines:

• Primary on-call
• How long to wait for acknowledgment
• Who gets paged next if they don’t respond
• Whether it escalates to:
  • backup engineer
  • team lead
  • manager
  • incident commander

3) If they miss the alert

Typical flow:

1. Alert goes to the primary on-call
2. If not acknowledged within the set time, the system auto-escalates
3. If auto-escalation isn’t configured, manually page/call/text the backup or next person in the chain
4. If it’s urgent, declare/continue the incident and notify the broader response channel

4) Good practice

Make sure your setup includes:

• A schedule with clear coverage
• Acknowledgment deadlines
• Escalation to at least one backup
• A way to contact the person directly in a true emergency

If you tell me what system you’re using (e.g. PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Datadog, Slack, custom tooling), I can give you the exact steps.