On-call rotations

SMS alerts to whoever is on call this week — without giving your monitoring system a roster of personal phone numbers and without trusting one human to forward every page.

The pattern

You have a monitoring tool that wants to send SMS alerts (PagerDuty isn't the only model — many ops teams use a thinner alerting setup that emits to SMS directly). You have an on-call rotation. The naive approach is to manually update the SMS destination every week. That fails the first time someone forgets.

SIMRelay's role

One hosted number receives all monitoring SMS. Forwarding rules route inbound messages to a Slack channel that the current on-call rotation already follows. When the rotation changes, you update the channel membership (or the forwarding rule), not the monitoring tool's configuration. The on-call surface stays a soft layer above SIMRelay rather than baked into every alerting integration.

Multi-team rotations

If you have separate rotations per team (database, network, application), give each its own SIMRelay number and its own Slack channel. The audit log lets you reconstruct who got which page and when — useful for incident reviews.

Escalation

SIMRelay isn't an escalation engine — it forwards, it doesn't decide. But the forwarding rules support a "fan out after delay" pattern: if the first recipient doesn't acknowledge in N minutes, fan the message out to a wider group. This isn't PagerDuty-level routing, but it's enough for small teams that don't have a dedicated incident platform yet.