28. 03. 2025 Giuseppe Di Garbo Atlassian, Service Management

Effortless On-Call Management with Jira Service Management

As discussed in my previous posts (Part 1 and Part 2) on managing Alerts with Jira Service Management, the way JSM handles alerts is crucial for keeping IT operations smooth. But what happens when an alert pops up at 3 AM? Who gets notified, and how? That’s where on-call management comes in.

Jira Service Management (JSM) provides built-in on-call scheduling that ensures the right people are notified at the right time. It offers three key features:

Routing Rules: direct alerts to the right team based on predefined conditions
Escalation Policies: ensure no alert is missed by automatically escalating unresolved incidents
Schedules: define who is on-call and when, so alerts reach the right people at the right time

Let’s take a closer look at how these work and why they matter.

How On-call Management Works in JSM

Imagine you’re managing an IT support team responsible for different services – database operations, network security, and application monitoring. Suddenly, an alert comes in for a critical database failure.

Routing Rules send the alert to the database support team instead of flooding all teams with notifications
If no one acknowledges the alert within a set time frame, Escalation Policies kick in, forwarding the alert to a senior engineer or another team
Schedules ensure that alerts reach only the team members who are on-call, whether it’s via email, SMS, voice call, or push notification

This structured approach prevents alert fatigue while ensuring critical issues get immediate attention and on-call duties are managed, helping teams respond efficiently while minimizing burnout.

Key Features of JSM On-call Management

Jira Service Management’s on-call features are designed to streamline incident handling for teams, ensuring that alerts reach the correct team members at the right time. Here’s a breakdown of the three key features:

Routing rules – Send alerts where they matter

Routing rules define how alerts reach the correct team based on factors like priority, service type, or issue category.

Example: If a high-priority alert is related to a network outage, it’s automatically routed to the Network Operations Team, while database alerts go to the DBA Team.

This prevents irrelevant alerts from reaching the wrong people and ensures that the most qualified team handles each incident.

Escalations – No alert left behind

Escalation policies ensure that alerts don’t get ignored. If the first on-call engineer doesn’t respond, the alert is escalated to the next level.

Example: If the on-call engineer doesn’t acknowledge an alert within 10 minutes, it gets escalated to a senior engineer or team lead. If another 15 minutes pass with no response, it escalates to management.

This ensures urgent issues are resolved quickly without relying on a single point of failure.

Schedules – The right person at the right time

On-call schedules define when team members are available to respond to alerts.

Example: Your support team has weekday, weekend, and night shifts. With schedules in place, alerts only notify those who are actually on-call at that time – no more waking up the wrong team member at 2 AM!

Plus, schedules can rotate automatically, ensuring fair workload distribution.

Best Practices for Effective On-Call Management

Jira Service Management provides several best practices for handling on-call schedules efficiently. Here’s a quick breakdown with real-world examples:

Balance Workloads – Avoid burning out your team by rotating shifts fairly. Example: instead of one engineer being on-call every weekend, rotate shifts among multiple team members.

Minimize Alert Fatigue – Filter non-critical alerts and use routing rules to ensure only relevant alerts reach on-call engineers. Example: low-priority alerts (like disk space warnings) can be batched into daily summaries, while critical alerts trigger immediate notifications.

Define Clear Escalation Paths – Make sure everyone knows what happens if an alert is missed. Example: if an alert isn’t acknowledged within 10 minutes, it escalates to another team member; after 30 minutes, it reaches a manager.

Regularly Review and Optimize Schedules – Analyze past incidents to adjust schedules and policies. Example: if most alerts occur during early morning hours, you might adjust on-call shifts to have more coverage at that time.

Conclusions

Jira Service Management makes on-call management simple, smart, and stress-free. By setting up routing rules, escalation policies, and schedules, teams can handle alerts efficiently without unnecessary interruptions.

A well-structured on-call system means fewer missed alerts, less fatigue, and faster incident resolution. How does your team manage on-call rotations?

References:

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Did you find this article interesting? Does it match your skill set? Our customers often present us with problems that need customized solutions. In fact, we’re currently hiring for roles just like this and others here at Würth Phoenix.

Giuseppe Di Garbo

Consultant at Würth Phoenix

Hi everybody. I’m Giuseppe and I was born in Milan in 1979. Since the early years of university, I was attracted by the Open Source world and operating system GNU\Linux. After graduation I had the opportunity to participate in a project of a startup for the realization of an Internet Service Provider. Before joining Würth Phoenix as SI consultant, I gained great experience as an IT consultant on projects related to business continuity and implementation of open source software compliant to ITIL processes of incident, change and service catalog management. My free time is completely dedicated to my wife and, as soon as possible, run away from Milan and his caotic time and trekking discover our beautiful mountain near Lecco for relax and lookup the (clean) sky.

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Giuseppe Di Garbo

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