---
title: "Page only for what cannot wait · Agent Wranglers"
url: https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/alerts-and-on-call/page-or-ticket
updated: 2026-10-20
licence: "All rights reserved"
---

# Page only for what cannot wait

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

- Level: Required
- Chapter: [Alerts and on-call](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/alerts-and-on-call)
- Rule: Split alerts into pages, which need someone now, and tickets, which can wait for working hours.
- How: A problem that hurts users now, or will within 4 hours, is a page. Everything else is a ticket. Send pages by phone or a paging app, such as PagerDuty or Grafana OnCall. Send tickets to the team queue. Promote a ticket to a page if users were hurt while it waited.
- Check: Every alert rule has a severity of page or ticket, and every page in the last month matches a moment users were affected.

**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/page-or-ticket`.

- Previous: [Make every alert actionable](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/alerts-and-on-call/actionable-alerts)
- Next: [Share on-call fairly](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/alerts-and-on-call/on-call-rota)
- [Alerts and on-call](https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/operations/alerts-and-on-call)