Voice & SMS Paging

Page on-call by phone call or SMS. Opt in, set your number, and ack pages without opening a laptop.

When to use loud paging

Slack DMs and email work for most alerts. They don’t work at 2 AM with the phone on Do Not Disturb.

SMS paging breaks through DND on most phones. Useful for high-severity incidents where you need a fast response. SMS is available on Pro and Business.

Voice paging makes a real phone call. It bypasses DND entirely on iOS and Android, plays a message describing the incident, and lets the responder ack by pressing 1 on the keypad. Voice is the loudest channel Signalog offers; reserve it for genuine production emergencies. Voice is Business-only.

Signalog handles SMS and voice delivery. There’s nothing to configure on your end beyond opting in and setting your phone number.

User opt-in

Loud paging is opt-in per user. Each user controls their own phone number and channel preferences from Profile → Notifications:

  1. Phone number: enter your number with country code (e.g., +15555550199)
  2. SMS paging: toggle on to receive SMS pages
  3. Voice paging: toggle on to receive phone-call pages (Business team members only)

Until both the phone number AND the relevant toggle are set, loud paging stays silent for that user.

Acknowledging from SMS

When you receive a page via SMS, you can ack two ways:

  1. Click the link in the message. Opens the incident in your browser, ack from there
  2. Reply with Y: the SMS is signed so we can verify the reply matches the incident; replies that don’t match anything active are ignored silently

Acknowledging from voice

Voice pages use an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system:

  1. The call rings the on-call’s phone
  2. They answer and hear: “This is Signalog. Acknowledge incident: payment processing degradation. Press 1 to acknowledge, 2 to escalate.”
  3. Pressing 1 acks the incident
  4. Pressing 2 immediately escalates to the next step in the policy

If they don’t answer, voicemail picks up and the page goes unacknowledged. Escalation continues.

Channel ordering in escalation policies

When you build an escalation policy, you can specify which channels fire at each step. A typical policy ramps up gradually:

StepDelayChannels
10 minSlack DM + push notification
25 minEmail + SMS
315 minVoice call
430 minPage entire team

Quiet at first (Slack), louder as time passes (SMS, voice), and finally team-wide if no one responds.

For critical Tier 1 services, consider starting with SMS at step 1. The few-second delay of “checking Slack first” can matter during outages.

Plan gating

FeatureFreeProBusiness
Slack / Email / Push paging✅✅✅
SMS paging—✅✅
Voice paging (phone call)——✅

Voice paging is gated to Business at the API level. Even if a user enables it in their profile, the feature only works for users on Business teams.

Privacy and compliance

Phone numbers are encrypted at rest. The audit log records when SMS and voice pages were sent (with the user ID, not the message content), but message bodies and call recordings are not stored.

If your jurisdiction requires opt-in records for receiving automated calls or texts, the user-level opt-in toggle in Profile → Notifications serves that purpose. The toggle’s state and last-changed timestamp are stored.

Common gotchas

“I’m not getting SMS pages even though I enabled them.” Check your phone number format. Must include country code (e.g., +15555550199). Domestic-only formats like 5555550199 won’t deliver.

“Voice calls go to voicemail.” This is normal if you don’t answer in 30 seconds. Voicemail counts as unacknowledged, so escalation continues. If you want a longer ring time, configure your phone, not Signalog.

“My ack reply didn’t work.” Make sure you replied Y or YES (case-insensitive) and that the incident is still active. Replies after the incident has been resolved or escalated past your step are ignored.

Next steps