Introducing the Spike.sh Alert Reliability Engine

by Pruthvi


At Spike.sh, our mission is to help dev teams understand and resolve production issues faster. At the core of this is our Alert Reliability Engine, whose job is to make sure that a team member always gets an alert on their preferred channel. Currently, we support 7 channels - phone call, SMS, mobile push notifications, email, Slack, Microsoft Teams and Discord. We wanted to give you a peek into how we achieve high deliverability across these channels.

One of the most popular features for Spike.sh customers is phone call alerts, and we do a lot to make sure you always get the call.

  • Large geographic coverage - We work with multiple vendors to make sure that no matter where your team is based, you are reachable via phone.
  • Dealing with Do Not Disturb (DND) - When an important incident is happening, we want to make sure we do everything to reach you. So if you don’t answer the phone or decline the call, we will redial that number within 2 minutes. This makes sure that we can reach you for critical alerts even if your phone is in Sleep or DND mode. Additionally, we provide a list of numbers in our contact card that you can add to your address book - this way, you will get the call even when in DND.
  • Fallback - We work with multiple vendors so that if one of them is not able to reach you, then we immediately try with a different vendor. We are going to add more enhancements to this in the future like letting you set up a backup phone number, and sending you an email about your phone being unavailable.

Future changes

  • Multiple phone numbers: Sometimes, team members can have multiple phone numbers. We plan to support this, and build a system that will automatically choose the right phone number based on past success data.
  • Voice settings: You can choose between different options for voice and accent so you can understand the incident information quickly.
  • Preferred vendor selection: You can test the vendors yourself from a console, and select your preferred vendor based on who reaches you most reliably