On-call in a group chat instead of a pager

Updated 1 October 2026 · BugsRadar team

A team of two to five doesn't have a pager, a rota tool or an incident process, and doesn't need one yet. It has a group chat where everyone already is. BugsRadar puts the first occurrence of every new error into that chat, and the chat does the rest: someone sees it, replies "on it", and the others know.

The group is the queue

Connect the project to the team's Telegram group or Discord channel. A new error arrives once, with the stack trace, and its repeats are counted in that same message without new notifications. Whoever picks it up replies in a thread or pins it; whoever fixes it says so. Nothing to assign, nothing to close: when the error stops, its message stops changing, and if it comes back after a quiet period it arrives as a new first message. See What you receive.

The phone of the person on call

Not everything should wake somebody. Give the on-call person a Pushover channel and, on the Pro plan, a rule on it: level Critical only. Log the errors that need a human at night at Critical and the rest at Error; the group gets everything, the phone gets the rest of the night off. See Rules and Pushover alerts.

Rotating the duty is a Pushover delivery group whose members you change on Pushover's side; the group key stays the same, so the BugsRadar channel never changes.

Staging never wakes anyone

Set the environment in the package configuration and give staging its own channel with a rule on it, or just leave it in the group: the environment is in every message, and the same error in staging and in production is counted separately, so one never hides the other. See Production, staging, dev.

A bad night, in messages

One Critical in Pushover at 02:10. The same error in the group with the stack trace. The group message edited to ×1,248 by 02:30. One bundle at 02:35 because two other things broke when the database went away. Nothing else until someone replies "fixed, it was the connection pool". Five messages, not five hundred: see Keeping the chat quiet.

What it doesn't do

No escalation, no acknowledgements, no on-call schedule: the chat and Pushover's delivery groups are the tools. When the team outgrows them, PagerDuty, Slack and Microsoft Teams are coming with the Business plan.

Where to go next

Rules is where Critical goes to the phone. Channels shows what Telegram, Discord and Pushover each do with repeats.