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On-call uses multiple channels (Mobile app, phone, SMS, Slack and email) to notify you of upcoming shifts and escalations. You’ll be able to use either the dashboard or the mobile app to add your contact methods and set notification rules.
Responders in Mainland China have a few setup differences — see On-call in China.

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Contact methods and notification preferences

Set up all contact methods you’d like to use within the incident.io dashboard. You can find your preferences by clicking your profile and then choosing preferences. Screenshot 2026-01-08 at 10.19.33.png Your Slack and email notifications should already be setup for you here by default but we’d also highly recommend adding your phone and downloading the mobile app is one of the most popular contact methods when escalations arise. After having all the methods you want to use for notifications, you can choose how we should notify you when you are on-call or are being escalated to e.g. via app, SMS, Phone Call, Slack etc. We have sensible default rules for your notifications but you can edit those rules depending on what works best for you. For example, you can add up to 10 levels of incrementally delayed notifications. Each notification method can also be individually configured to bypass Do Not Disturb — so you can, for example, send a quiet push notification immediately and only escalate to a loud, DND-bypassing call after a minute if unacknowledged. Screenshot 2025-03-17 at 09.40.17.png Additionally, it’s important to have reminders to know when you are about to be on-call. Below On-call notifications, you can adjust your shift change rules to get reminders before your shift starts, or when your shift ends. Screenshot 2025-03-17 at 09.41.26.png

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Mobile app settings

Download the incident.io mobile app and sign in using one of these methods:
  • Slack, Microsoft Teams, or SAML: Open the mobile app and sign in directly
  • QR code from the dashboard: Open the sidebar or command palette in the web dashboard and select Sign in on mobile. Scan the QR code with your phone’s camera to sign in instantly — no need to type credentials on your phone
If your organization uses SAML, the QR code will take you through your identity provider’s sign-in flow. SAML enforcement is always respected.
Once signed in, we’ll guide you through an onboarding flow to set up the right notifications:
  1. Enabling Push Notifications
  2. Enabling Critical Notifications
  3. Saving our Contact Card on your phone
  4. Verifying your phone number
  5. Bypassing the ‘Do not disturb’ mode
Doing all the above ensures that you will not miss any important updates or notifications! You will be able to review all settings in the mobile app later on.

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Testing

After setting up all notifications and preferences, you can test that all notifications paths work. Just click “Test” on mobile or the bell icon on the web app and you should receive a test message to the right channel.

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Mobile app preferences

Additionally, you will be able to change appearance between Light and Dark mode on the settings page of the mobile app. You can also just follow the device’s theme you have set up.
You can find more details about bypassing the ‘Do not disturb’ mode in iOS and Android in this help article

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Adding contact methods for other users

If you need to add a contact method on behalf of another user, admins can do this from the team members page. See Adding contact methods for another user for details.

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FAQs

For non-mobile numbers — VoIP, Google Voice, or landlines — we default to voice calls only because most can’t reliably receive SMS. Mobile numbers get both SMS and voice by default.If your number does in fact receive SMS, you can enable it from your notification preferences (see below).
Some VoIP and Google Voice numbers can receive SMS even though we can’t detect this automatically. To enable SMS:
  1. Open your notification preferences and find your phone number
  2. Send a test SMS to confirm the number actually receives it
  3. Toggle on SMS support and confirm that you’ve checked the number does support SMS
We require a successful test send before enabling SMS so you don’t add a notification rule to a number that can’t receive one.
Yes. You can turn off either capability from your notification preferences — useful if your number is voice-only or SMS-only.Before disabling a channel, remove any notification rules that depend on it. We block the change if a rule would be left targeting an unsupported channel.
Some countries don’t support SMS or voice routing through our providers. If a capability can’t be delivered to your country, we block the override. See supported countries for the full list.
When you enable SMS on a non-mobile number, we send a one-off message explaining how to opt out (reply STOP) or get help (reply HELP). This is a US carrier compliance requirement and sends once per number.