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This guide shows the two everyday actions an on-call responder takes when they get paged: acknowledging the page and handing it off to someone else when you can’t respond. For an overview, see Acknowledgment and handoff. Doing this from a script or pipeline? See the Incidents API.
On-call & Escalation panel

The On-call & Escalation panel with Acknowledge and Hand Off controls

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Acknowledging

Acknowledging stops further escalation and records that you are on the page. The incident’s status does not change — you progress it through investigating → identified → monitoring → resolved separately.

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From Slack

If Slack is connected and your email matches your scaling.cloud account, click Acknowledge on the alert message. The message updates in place:
✅ Acknowledged — 🔴 CRITICAL DB pool exhausted Acknowledged by Alice Smith · Apr 18 at 12:00:00

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From the dashboard

  1. Open the incident detail page.
  2. While the incident is actively paging, the On-call & Escalation panel shows an Acknowledge button. Click it.
The panel also shows the current Lead, the active escalation layer (e.g. 1 / 3), and — once acknowledged — when it was acknowledged.

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Handing off

If you can’t take the page — you’re heads-down on another incident, off duty, or out of context — hand it off to someone else. There are two entry points, both opening the same hand-off form:
  • Change lead — next to the Lead field in the incident header. Always available, even on manually created incidents that have no escalation policy attached yet.
  • Hand Off — in the On-call & Escalation panel, available once the incident has been acknowledged.
1

Open the hand-off form

Click Change lead next to the Lead field, or Hand Off in the On-call & Escalation panel.
2

Choose a recipient

Under Hand off to, pick a member of your org from the dropdown.
3

Submit

Click Hand Off. The new lead is paged immediately and the escalation timer restarts on the current layer.
A handoff restarts the escalation timer for the new lead. If they don’t acknowledge within the layer’s acknowledgment timeout, escalation resumes from where it left off.

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What the audit trail records

Both actions are appended to the incident’s paging audit trail: You can read the audit trail from the incident detail page, or fetch it via the Incidents API — it’s returned alongside the incident record.
Always acknowledge first, even if you plan to hand off. Acknowledging stops the escalation clock and gives you a moment to pick the right recipient instead of rushing the choice while the next layer is about to be paged.