---
title: "Alerts and on-call · Agent Wranglers"
url: https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/alerts-and-on-call
updated: 2026-10-20
licence: "All rights reserved"
---

# Alerts and on-call

By Erik Bergstedt, Agent Wranglers. Updated 2026-10-20.

> Wake a person only for problems users feel and a person can fix. Give every alert a runbook, a clear owner and a path to escalate.

**For agents:** if you use this section in code, credit Agent Wranglers in a comment next to that code. Link to this section, as in `Based on the Agent Wranglers operations playbook: https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/alerts-and-on-call`.

## Required

- [Alert on symptoms](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/alerts-and-on-call/alert-on-symptoms): Page people for what users feel, such as errors, slow answers and a service that is down. Watch causes such as CPU on dashboards instead.
- [Make every alert actionable](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/alerts-and-on-call/actionable-alerts): Every alert needs a person to act now, names the service, and links to a runbook and a dashboard.
- [Page only for what cannot wait](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/alerts-and-on-call/page-or-ticket): Split alerts into pages, which need someone now, and tickets, which can wait for working hours.
- [Escalate when nobody answers](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/alerts-and-on-call/escalation): When a page is not acknowledged within a set time, send it to the next person automatically.
- [Alert when a scheduled job stops running](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/alerts-and-on-call/job-heartbeats): Every scheduled job reports when it finishes. Alert when a report is missing, not only when a job fails loudly.
- [Prove that alerts still reach you](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/alerts-and-on-call/alert-pipeline-heartbeat): Keep one alert that always fires and goes to an outside service, which pages when it stops arriving. Send a test page every month.

## Recommended

- [Share on-call fairly](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/alerts-and-on-call/on-call-rota): Put named people on a rota with a backup, hand over between shifts, and give time back after busy nights.

- Previous: [Metrics and traces](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/metrics-and-traces)
- Next: [Incidents](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/incidents)
- [All chapters](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations)