Alerting without adopting a platform

You wanted the phone to ring. You were offered a methodology.

Every serious alerting tool now sits inside an incident management platform, and platforms have opinions. Incidents have statuses. Responders have roles. There is a retrospective template, a severity taxonomy somebody has to define, and a service catalog that is only useful once it is complete and only stays complete if somebody owns it.

None of that is wrong. It is just a second project, and it arrives attached to the first one.

What you can have instead

The paging half, on its own, taken seriously:

• A rotation, with layers and overrides.
• An escalation chain that moves to the next person when the first does not answer, and says so when nobody does.
• Push that breaks through silent mode, plus email.
• Ingest from whatever you already run, and outbound webhooks into whatever you already use.
• A history of what fired, who was paged, and what they did.

No process to adopt. Nothing to fill in. Your incident response stays whatever it already is — a channel and three people, most likely — and the tool's job is to get one of those three on the phone.

The honest trade

You give up the things a platform is for, and you should expect to feel that eventually:

• Nothing publishes a status page for you.
• Nothing makes anyone write a postmortem, or holds you to the actions in it.
• Nothing maps services to owners, so "who owns this" stays a question you answer socially.
• Nothing coordinates a response involving people who are not engineers.

If you are big enough that those gaps hurt, that is the signal to buy a platform, and we would rather you did than resented us for not being one.

How you know it is time

A few honest markers, none of which are about headcount:

• Customers ask where to look during an outage, often enough that answering individually is a job.
• The same failure happens twice because the first one was never written down.
• An incident needs somebody who does not read the engineering channel.
• Nobody can list the services, or say who owns one, without asking.

Until then, the thing you are missing is probably not process. It is that the page did not arrive, or it woke the wrong person.

When this is the wrong answer

If you need status pages your customers read, a postmortem process the tool enforces, a service catalog, or incident roles and comms templates, buy a platform that has them. You will be happier and it will be cheaper than assembling the same thing out of parts.

Acked is for the case where you looked at that platform, realised you would use one tenth of it, and could not find anything smaller that was still serious about waking people up.