The page comes in. The first step is already on your wrist.
When PagerDuty, Opsgenie or any paging app pages you, Routine Run starts your runbook on its own. The first step is on the Lock Screen and the watch before you have found your glasses. Starting it by itself needs iOS 27.
You get the page away from your desk, and the runbook is in a wiki.
The expensive part of a page is rarely the fix. It is the first few minutes: finding what actually fired, deciding if it is real, telling the others you have it. A head woken at 3am drops steps, and the runbook is a tab you have not opened yet.
Routine Run puts the order in front of you instead. One step at a time, the one in hand, with Next on the Lock Screen and on your wrist. You make the calls and it holds the sequence.
- 1Read what actually fired.
The alert, not the channel it landed in: what is the check, and what value tripped it. Two minutes on the timer.
- 2Say whether it is real.
Out loud, before touching anything. The step asks you first. Half of these are a threshold nobody has revisited since the service got busier.
- 3Acknowledge it.
So the next person on the rota knows somebody has it.
- 4Write down what you think is happening.
Now, while it is a guess. It is worth more than the tidy version you write afterwards.
- 5Fix it, or hand it on.
Both are answers. Sitting on it is not.
You do every step. Where you want one to do something, such as run the shortcut that acknowledges the page in your paging app, add that action to the step.
From the page to the first step, with nobody touching the phone.
You build one automation in the Shortcuts app, once, in about five minutes. After that Routine Run takes it from there.
It is not a second pager. It is the part after the page.
The same alert twice is one run
Repeats of an alert are recognised, by its event number or by who sent it and what it said, and marked as duplicates instead of starting again.
A storm does not start run after run
There is a limit per hour. What goes over it is held, and the journal says when there is room again, so one outage does not wake you again and again.
Every decision has a reason
Started, held, ignored as a duplicate: each is a line in the journal with the why. In the morning you can see what came in and what the app did with it.
Ask first, where you want to
A routine can wait for your yes before it does something that cannot be taken back, and show you what it is about to do.
A page never ends a run you are in
The paging routine allows several runs at once, and a new event never stops one that is going. A second page gets its own run, so the first stays in your hand.
Wake me, for the first step
Notifications stay quiet under a Focus and with the silent switch on. Set the first step to Wake me and it rings as an alarm the moment the run starts.
Five routines for being on call.
Pick Being on call the first time the app asks what brought you here, and the first one is added for you.
When something pages you
The five steps above. Starts from a page.
A practice page
Two minutes, nothing real. Stops and asks at the second step, the way a real page will.
Handing the pager over
What fired this shift, what is still open, what you silenced, and a confirmation they have it.
After it is fixed
What broke, what told you, what did not work, what would have caught it sooner.
The alert that keeps coming back
Count it, say what you do each time, then automate it, retune it or delete it.
Practise first, then the real thing.
- 1Add the practice page.
Run it once with nothing at stake, so the first real page is not the first time you see a step ask a question.
- 2Build the automation in Shortcuts.
When you receive a notification from your paging app, run Handle Event. The help page has each tap, and what PagerDuty sends.
- 3Send a test event.
In Settings, under Events from elsewhere, one press sends a test event through the same path a page takes.
Five minutes, once.
The full setup, with what each Shortcuts screen looks like.
The honest list.
Everything on this page works except starting by itself. A page sent to an address in Settings › Connections reaches the phone as a notification, and the run starts when you tap it. Or start it by hand, from the Action button, or by voice: “Routine Run me through When something pages you”. The phrases are here.
It does not page you and it does not replace your paging service. Keep the service’s own alerts on. Notifications depend on the phone, its battery, its Focus and what iOS allows, and they can be late.
There is no account. With the Shortcuts automation there is no server of ours in the path either. A pager connected straight to an address in Settings › Connections goes through our relay, which passes the page to your phone and keeps none of it. Either way the event is decided on your phone, and the journal stays on it. Privacy has the rest.
One phone is one person, and there is no shared account. Share a routine by link and a colleague adds it to their own phone, with Publish for a sign or a wiki.
The thinking behind one step in hand is in the method, and the starter routines are in Routines.