OpsGenie routes alerts to the right person using policies, on-call schedules, etc. defined by users. Over the last year, we’ve heard similar questions from number of OpsGenie customers: “Can we route phone calls to the right person like we route the alerts?”.
They’ve had their on-call schedules already defined in OpsGenie and they were receiving phone calls from their users for support and other purposes. It made sense to use the on-call schedules to route the call to the right person. The request resonated with us. In addition to our support site, email and live chat, we provide phone support OpsGenie customers, so we needed such a solution ourselves. Potential solutions readily available in the market did not meet the requirements of our customers and fell short for our needs as well. So we’ve ended up developing it.
For the last couple of months, a handful of OpsGenie customers have been using the “incoming calls” (great name I know) feature, and we’ve been using it ourselves to route support calls to the on-call engineer. Based on our own experiences and the feedback from the early adapters, we’ve enhanced the solution to meet a wider set of requirements, and we’re happy to announce the support for incoming calls in OpsGenie. Here is how it works:
- Provision a phone number(s) (available for many countries) from OpsGenie
- Configure how OpsGenie should route the call (Forward Calls To). For example, an on-call schedule can be used to determine who should receive the call.
- When some calls the phone number assigned to your account, OpsGenie uses your configuration and forward the call to the right person.
- OpsGenie also creates and alerts and can notify the specified people that there was an incoming phone call.
- If no one answers the phone, the caller is instructed to leave a message. The message is recorded and attached to the alert that was created and can be listened by the alert recipients.
That’s all it takes; a few clicks and you’re all set with a phone number that follows your workflow. There are number of benefits to routing the incoming phone calls this way:
- Calls can be forwarded to anyone in the world, enabling geographically dispersed organizations to provide support seamlessly.
- OpsGenie can try a second person if the first person does not answer, providing some redundancy
- The alert generated by OpsGenie for the call can be handled like any alert in OpsGenie, rules and policies can be used to route the alert to the right people based on the caller’s phone number.
- Alert activity log indicates whether the call was answered, how long it lasted, etc.
- Information about the call can be forwarded to team chat rooms using OpsGenie integrations with Slack, HipChat, Campfire, etc. and to other systems via OpsGenie webhook or Marid integration.
Incoming phone call routing has become an essential part of our tool set. We hope that you’ll find it useful as well. Please contact us if you have any questions about this new feature.