Incident response for small teams that still need clear ownership.

Keep the workflow small but explicit

A small team can often survive with chat messages and a shared calendar until alerts become frequent, ownership becomes unclear or handoffs start to fail. IncidentRelay gives the team a defined path from alert intake to responder action without forcing a heavy enterprise process.

The basic setup is simple: create a team, create a rotation, attach channels, add one or more routes and send alerts from the monitoring system.

What the team gets

• One current on-call owner from the rotation schedule.
• Route matchers so alerts go to the right team instead of a noisy shared channel.
• Acknowledge, resolve and silence actions for incident hygiene.
• Escalation policies when the first responder does not react.
• Incident history that remains visible after the chat scrolls away.

A practical first workflow

Start with one production route and one notification channel. Match only critical alerts first, verify the selected responder, then add lower-severity notifications when the team is confident in the routing.

Why self-hosting matters here

Small teams often care about cost and control. A self-hosted setup keeps alert data, user data and operational history inside the environment the team already manages.