PagerPal Domain Glossary
Shared language for incidents, responders, escalation, notifications, and operator workflows.
Incident
A tracked outage or alert condition for a team. Incidents move through triggered, acknowledged, and resolved states and keep timeline events plus notification history.
Alert Source
A monitoring system or integration that can create, update, or recover incidents through PagerPal webhooks. Each Alert Source belongs to a team and has its own API key.
Alert Source API Key
The per-source credential used by monitoring systems when calling PagerPal ingestion endpoints. Operators should prefer header-based credentials such as X-API-Key: <alert-source-key>.
External ID
The stable alert identifier supplied by a monitoring system. PagerPal uses it with the Alert Source to update an existing open incident instead of creating duplicates.
Recovery Webhook
A webhook payload from a monitoring system that marks an alert as recovered. PagerPal can use recovery payloads to resolve matching open incidents.
Team
A group that owns Alert Sources, schedules, escalation policies, and incidents.
Responder
A person PagerPal can assign, page, or show to operators. Responders can exist for paging even when they do not have a login password.
User Account
A responder with login credentials. User Accounts can sign in to the Operator UI or authenticate to the Management API.
Role
The access level on a User Account: admin, responder, or viewer. Admins manage configuration, responders can act on incidents, and viewers are read-only.
Operator UI
The authenticated PagerPal web interface used to manage teams, responders, schedules, escalation policies, alert sources, incidents, and settings.
Management API
The authenticated API surface used by scripts or integrations that manage PagerPal configuration and incident actions.
On-Call Schedule
A team-owned rotation made of schedule entries. Active entries whose window covers the current time determine who should receive pages.
Schedule Override
A temporary coverage entry that intentionally overlaps normal schedule entries and takes precedence during its active window.
Escalation Policy
A team-owned paging ladder attached to new incidents. It controls when PagerPal should move from one responder or team target to the next.
Escalation Level
One step in an Escalation Policy. A level defines when it becomes due, which channels to use, and which responder or team target should be notified.
Notification Outbox
Durable notification records used to track queued, sent, delivered, failed, and exhausted notification attempts.
Notification Provider
An external service used to deliver pages, such as Infobip for SMS/WhatsApp or SMTP for email.
Delivery Receipt
A provider callback that updates notification evidence after a message is accepted, delivered, rejected, or failed.
Acknowledge
The action that records a responder has taken ownership of an incident.
Resolve
The action that records an incident is fixed and should stop paging.
Reopen
The action that moves a resolved incident back to active when the problem returns.
Manual Escalation
The action that advances an active incident to the next escalation target before the automatic delay expires.
Retry Notification
The action that requeues failed or exhausted notification attempts after the underlying provider or configuration problem is fixed.
Safe Mode
A local/testing configuration where notification sending and background workers can be disabled so operators can test UI flows without sending real pages.