That’s where on-call management comes in. A good on-call process ensures that incidents are routed to the right people, handled quickly, and documented clearly. So teams stay reliable without burning out.
In this guide, we’ll break down what on-call management is, why it matters, the challenges teams face, and how modern tools like Parny can make it easier. We’ll also walk through how to use Parny in real life and how to benefit from its full stack of features.
What Is On-Call Management?
On-call management is the structured process of handling alerts and incidents when systems go down or show signs of trouble.
In modern engineering teams, systems can fail at any hour; servers crash, APIs go unresponsive, databases become slow, or critical services suddenly stop working. On-call management ensures that when these issues occur, someone is immediately aware and can respond, rather than letting the problem escalate unnoticed.
At its core, it ensures that:
Alerts reach the right person at the right time: Notifications can be sent via multiple channels; phone calls, SMS, push notifications, email, or chat tools like Slack and Teams. In critical cases, tools can literally wake up the on-call engineer in the middle of the night to ensure no downtime goes unnoticed.
Duty rotations are fair: On-call schedules distribute responsibility across the team so that no single engineer is overburdened with nights, weekends, or holidays.
Escalations are automatic: If the first responder doesn’t acknowledge an alert within a set time, it escalates to the next person or team, preventing delays in critical response.
Incidents are tracked and documented transparently: Alerts can be grouped into incidents, roles and responsibilities are clear, and postmortem reports capture actions and decisions for future learning.
Typical features of on-call management include:
Duty Rotations (Schedules): defining who is on call, when, with fair rotation logic.
Escalation Policies: if one person doesn’t respond, escalate to the next person or team.
Multi-Channel Notifications: Slack, Teams, email, push, SMS etc.
Incident Tracking & Postmortems: grouping alerts, tracking start/end, roles, decision logs.
Why Do Teams Need On-Call Management?
Without a clear process, incidents turn into chaos:
Alerts get lost or ignored.
Multiple engineers scramble on the same problem.
Nobody is accountable.
Huge stress, burnout, low morale.
With on-call management, teams gain:
Reliability; better uptime, faster response.
Accountability & clarity: everyone knows who does what.
Efficiency; fewer duplicated efforts, less noise.
Continuous learning; postmortems, trend analysis.
Common Challenges in On-Call Management
Even there is a big progress when you use on-call management tools, you still might struggle with:
Alert Fatigue, too many irrelevant or duplicate alerts.
Poor Filtering / Prioritization, low threshold alerts drown out the critical ones.
Difficulty with Dependencies / Root Cause, not seeing how services connect makes debugging slow.
Lack of visibility into SLA status, metrics, past incidents.
Onboarding & Handoff Issues, incoming on-call engineers often lack full context on ongoing incidents.
Key Features of Parny (parny.io) That Solve On-Call Challenges
Modern engineering teams face constant pressure: alerts coming from multiple monitoring tools, unclear responsibilities, and the stress of midnight wake-up calls. Parny is built to tackle these challenges head-on, providing a full suite of on-call management features. Here’s a deep dive into its core capabilities and how they help your team stay reliable.
1. AI-Powered Anomaly Detection
Parny continuously scans all incoming alerts in real time from your various monitoring tools. Its AI analyzes patterns, detects unusual spikes, rare events, and correlations across multiple sources. It also reduces noise by grouping similar alerts and filtering duplicates.
Benefits / Use Cases:
Detect issues before they escalate into outages.
Reduce “false alarms” and avoid alert fatigue.
Prevent duplicated alerts from multiple tools, giving engineers a clearer picture of what actually matters.
2. On-Call Management
Parny offers robust on-call management capabilities, including:
Shift Scheduling: Easily create and manage on-call schedules.
Escalation Policies: Define custom escalation paths to ensure timely response.
3. InfraMap (Real-Time Infrastructure & Dependency Mapping)
Parny provides a live, visual map of all your services and their dependencies. This makes it easy to see how an upstream failure might affect downstream systems.
Benefits / Use Cases:
Quickly identify the root cause of incidents.
Triaging becomes faster and more accurate.
Team members gain a better understanding of system impact during outages.
4. Uptime Pulse (“Parny Pulse”)
Parny Pulse monitors critical services with real-time heartbeat checks, usually every minute. If a service goes down silently -without triggering an alert- Parny sends an immediate notification.
Benefits / Use Cases:
Catch silent failures before users notice.
Maintain higher SLAs and improve user experience.
Track uptime trends over time to proactively improve reliability.
5. Alert Rules, Filtering & Prioritization
Parny allows you to define complex alert rules: filter by severity, source, or message patterns, and tag alerts for easier handling. Rules are processed in order, ensuring the first match triggers the right action.
Benefits / Use Cases:
Reduce alert fatigue by filtering out low-impact alerts.
Ensure only urgent, relevant notifications reach engineers.
Customize per team or service, making alerts actionable.
6. Incident Management
When multiple alerts are related, Parny groups them into a single incident. Teams can assign a commander, set assignees, and define automatic escalation rules. Postmortem reports are generated automatically.
Benefits / Use Cases:
Clear ownership and accountability during incidents.
Reduce duplicated efforts across the team.
Learn from incidents with actionable reports and metrics.
7. Integrations With Your Existing Stack
Parny connects to over 40 popular monitoring tools, cloud services, and communication platforms like Slack, Teams, Prometheus, and AWS. You can also configure custom webhooks.
Benefits / Use Cases:
Easily integrate without reworking your current monitoring setup.
Maintain continuity across multiple alert sources.
Notifications and escalations flow directly into tools your team already uses.
8. SLA Tracking
Parny allows teams to monitor Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in real-time. This feature provides alerts before SLA breaches occur, helping teams maintain service reliability and meet their commitments.
9. AI Assistant
Parny’s AI assistant helps investigate alerts, suggests actions, and accelerates resolution times. By leveraging AI, teams can respond to incidents more efficiently and effectively.
10. Parny Heartbeats
Parny Heartbeats provides a simple push-based mechanism for monitoring service health. Each system or component periodically sends heartbeat signals to Parny, confirming it is alive and functioning. If a heartbeat is missed or delayed, Parny immediately detects the anomaly and alerts the relevant teams. This proactive approach helps identify outages faster, minimizes downtime, and ensures reliable visibility into critical services.
How to Use Parny in Practice: Step-by-Step Guide
Here’s a practical workflow to get your team running on Parny:
Step 1: Sign Up & Initial Setup
Creating Account
Go to parny.io and create an account (free plan available).
Then click the link sent to your email and set your password.
Congratulations! You have successfully created your Parny account — now log in.
Creating an Organization
(Optional) You can create an organization right during sign-up by entering an organization name.
If you did not create an organization during registration, log in to your account, click the Settings button at the bottom-left corner, then click Create Organization. Enter the organization name and click Create.
Congratulations! Your organization has been successfully created.
Creating a Team
From the left-hand panel, click on Teams.
On the Teams page, click the + New Team button in the top-right corner.
In the pop-up that appears, enter your desired team name and click Create.
Congratulations! You have successfully created your first team.
Click the Members button as shown in the image.
In the Members tab, click the + New Member button in the top-right corner.
Select the organization members you want to add to this team and click Add.
Step 2: Connect Monitoring Tools
Congratulations! You have successfully set up your organization and team — now it’s time to start receiving alerts.
From the left-hand panel, click on Services.
In the Services page, select the team you want to integrate from the dropdown menu in the middle top section.
Click the + New Service button in the top-right corner.
In the Service Name field, enter the name you want to assign to your service.
In the combobox below, select the service you want to integrate.
Congratulations! You have successfully created a service.
Note: Each integration has its own documentation available at https://parny.io/integrations.
Step 3: Define On-Call Schedules & Escalations
Now that we have integrated the desired services, the next question is: how do we set up On-Call?
From the left-hand panel, click on On-Call.
On the On-Call page, use the dropdown in the middle top section to select the team for which you want to configure the on-call schedule.
To set your on-call schedule, you have several options:
Option 1: Manual Day Selection
Click on any single day (or hold down your mouse to select multiple days) and then release the mouse button.
In the pop-up that appears, fill in the required fields and click Add.
This action will assign the selected user as on-call at the chosen level for the specified date range.
Option 2: Parny Shift (Escalation Layout)
Click the Parny Shift button in the top-right corner.
In the interface that appears, arrange your team members on the left side as shown in the example image.
The order in which you place them defines their escalation levels and determines how they will be notified based on your on-call rules.
Once you have finished arranging members, click the Generate Shifts button at the bottom-right corner.
Congratulations! You have successfully created your first on-call schedule.
Step 4: Configuring Alert Rules
You have successfully added your on-call schedule. Now it’s time to define when and how the on-call members should be notified.
Note: The pre-created Default Rule will route all alerts to the selected escalation member even if you don’t define any custom rule.
In addition to the Default Rule, you can add your own custom rule by going back to the On-Call page.
In the top-right corner, click on Rules.
On the Rules page, use the dropdown in the middle top section to select the team for which you want to configure a rule.
Click the + New Rule button in the top-right corner.
In the pop-up that appears, fill in the relevant fields (e.g., Rule Name, Filters) and configure how notifications should be sent (Call, SMS, Push).
Once done, click Add to successfully create your first rule.
Step 5: InfraMap & Dependency Mapping
Instead of detailing the steps here, you can directly follow the full documentation for InfraMap and Dependency Mapping:
Documentation: https://portal.parny.io/dashboard/parny-inframap/document
InfraMap TL;DR
Map all services and dependencies with Parny agent.
Ensure that upstream/downstream relationships are visible during incidents for faster root-cause analysis.
Step 6: Uptime Monitoring with Pulse
From the left-hand panel, navigate to Parny Pulse.
In the Pulse page, click the New Target button in the top-right corner.
Fill in the required fields.
Assign the monitor to a team.
Congratulations! You have successfully created your Pulse target.
Step 7: Run Test Alerts & Incident Simulations
Trigger test alerts to verify rules, notifications, and escalation flows.
Simulate incidents to practice war-room collaboration and response workflows.
Step 8: Reports, Postmortems & Analytics
After incidents, review postmortem reports and metrics.
Identify recurring alert types, bottlenecks, and opportunities for process improvement.
Adjust alert rules and thresholds over time to keep your system tuned.
