Phone call

For the alerts that have to wake someone.

Call a number through your Twilio connection and read the alert aloud, twice. A ringing phone gets through where a text does not, which makes this the last step in an escalation rather than the first.

Read aloud, twice. The alert is spoken through the call and repeated, so a half-awake person does not have to catch it first time.
Your own Twilio account. The same connection type used for SMS. You control the number and pay Twilio directly.
The top of the escalation. Put it at the end of a chain, after a channel post, an email and a wait, so it only rings when everything quieter has failed.

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01 · Using it well

The loudest tool deserves the most care.

A phone call is the most intrusive thing Hesklo can do. Used sparingly it is invaluable, and used carelessly it is the reason people stop trusting alerts.

Last resort, not first response

Chain it after a channel post and an email. If the quieter steps do their job, the call never happens.

Behind acknowledgement

Branch on "not acknowledged in N minutes" and put the call on the true path, so it only rings when nobody has claimed the incident.

Behind a Wait

Give the outage time to resolve itself. A call about a service that came back two minutes later is a call that damages trust.

Only your most critical monitors

Because flows belong to individual monitors, you can reserve calls for the handful of services that genuinely justify them.

Pair with the on-call rota

Combine with an email step following the schedule so the escalation reaches the person who is actually on duty.

Once per incident

The default, and the only sensible setting here. Firing on every check would call repeatedly through an outage.

Questions

Common questions

What does the recipient actually hear?

The call reads the alert aloud and repeats it, so the message is delivered twice within the same call. Sending a test first is worth doing, since it is better to know how it sounds before it rings during an actual incident.

Do I need a Twilio account for phone calls?

Yes. Calls go through your own Twilio connection, the same as SMS, so you control the number they come from and pay Twilio directly.

Should a phone call be my first alert?

Almost never. It is the most intrusive option available, which makes it valuable precisely because it is rare. Most teams put it at the end of an escalation, behind a wait and an acknowledgement branch, so it only rings when quieter steps have already failed.

How do I make sure it only calls for real outages?

Three controls stack up. The monitor confirm down after setting means brief failures never create an incident. A Wait block delays the call until the outage has genuinely persisted. An acknowledgement branch means it only fires if nobody has already picked the incident up.