SMS vs. push notification vs. phone call for alerts — which channel for what?
Q: Which alert channel should actually wake someone up?
A: Match the channel to severity, and don't send everything to one. Push notifications are free and fine for low-stakes, daytime alerts — but they're easy to sleep through and silently fail if the app's logged out. SMS is more reliable for reaching a phone and works on weak signal. A phone call is the only channel loud and persistent enough to wake someone at 3 a.m.
The pattern that works: push/email for warnings, SMS for real incidents during the day, and an escalating phone call for a critical outage that isn't acknowledged within a few minutes.
The part people skip is the escalation chain — if the first person doesn't ack in 5 minutes, it calls the next. A single un-escalated SMS to a sleeping phone is how outages run for hours.
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SMS vs. push notification vs. phone call for alerts — which channel for what?
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