How do I organize on-call in a small team without PagerDuty?
With the Team plan, you share sources, rules and history in one account. Five people are included, and you can book more seats at an extra charge. For each source you decide who gets its alerts: the whole team or selected members. A rule escalates to another device or an email address after a deadline without acknowledgment. There is no schedule that hands on-call duty over automatically.
Rules for this use case
Invite the team and assign roles
The owner invites by email. admin has every permission, operator manages history, sources and rules, member receives alerts. Before the first invitation, the owner signs the data processing agreement (DPA) in the dashboard.
Set up escalation
If an alert at error or above stays unacknowledged for ten minutes, it also goes to the team lead's address. Acknowledged is not resolved: the incident stays open but stops escalating.
{ "enabled": true, "stop": false, "when": { "severity_at_least": "error" }, "then": { "level": "high", "escalate_after": "10m", "then_notify": [ "email:oncall-lead@example.com" ] } }Silence staging after hours
Alerts from the staging source are not delivered every evening between 18:00 and 8:00. They still show up in the history.
{ "enabled": true, "stop": false, "when": { "source": [ "staging" ], "time": { "days": [ "mo", "tu", "we", "th", "fr", "sa", "su" ], "from": "18:00", "to": "08:00", "tz": "Europe/Berlin" } }, "then": { "mute": true } }
Where the limits are
- No rotating schedule. If you rotate weekly, you change the recipients of the sources by hand.
- The Team plan includes five people; every further seat is charged extra.
- No phone calls, no SMS, no push on Android.
Frequently asked questions
- Does every member see all alerts?
- No. For each source you decide whether the whole team or only selected members get the alerts.
- Does everyone need an iPhone?
- For push on a phone, an iPhone or iPad. On a computer, the Windows app works. Android users get no push but can see the history in the browser.
- Do I need a data processing agreement (DPA)?
- Yes, as soon as you invite people. The owner signs it in the dashboard, and without a signed agreement PagerDeck does not allow invitations.
Read next
- PagerDeck for IT operations
Ten connected systems, one phone, and a rule chain that decides which of them is allowed to ring at night.
- PagerDeck as a PagerDuty alternative
PagerDuty is incident management for organizations. PagerDeck is push alerting with rules for individuals and small teams.
- Opsgenie is being retired. PagerDeck as an alternative
Atlassian shuts down Opsgenie on April 5, 2027. For small teams, push alerting with rules is often enough.
- Grafana alerts to your iPhone with your own rules
One webhook contact point is enough. Grafana sends its default format, PagerDeck reads the title, urgency and links itself, and your rules decide how loud it gets.
On-call without an enterprise contract
Create a team, assign sources, set up escalation. 14 days, no payment method needed.
Last reviewed: October 2026. PagerDeck, a product of Gonzi Tech UG (haftungsbeschränkt)
Product and company names mentioned are trademarks of their respective owners. PagerDeck is not affiliated with, sponsored or endorsed by them. Details in the imprint.