Paging Window Policy

Some alerts only matter during business hours. Time-window them.

When

Paging windows fit alerts whose impact is genuinely bounded to business hours: internal tools, dev environments, batch jobs whose output nobody consumes overnight. The "would a customer notice?" gate is the test. If a customer is impacted at 3 AM, the alert stays pageable regardless of how much the on-call wants to sleep.

• Team-hours-only impact. "Matters only when the team is around" check per alert. Internal tools, dev environments, batch jobs whose output is read in the morning.
• Off-hours: dashboard only. Internal-tool degradations route to dashboards rather than pages outside business hours. Reviewed in the morning.
• Customer-impact gate. "Would a customer notice?" check per alert. Catches the wrong window before it ships.
• Named window plus timezone. Documented business-hours range and timezone per alert. Supports rotation handoffs across timezones.

Design

The window design is per-alert, not per-team. Same underlying signal can drive different routes inside versus outside business hours: page in-hours, dashboard off-hours, holiday-aware so the on-call gets actually-not-on-call days.

• Per-alert routing. "Page during business hours; dashboard otherwise" rule encoded in the routing config. Not in tribal knowledge.
• In-hours and off-hours pair. Same signal, two alerts with different routes. Reduces 3 AM noise without losing the underlying signal.
• Explicit timezone. Named timezone per rule. Catches DST and follow-the-sun mistakes that vague "9 to 5" rules introduce.
• Holiday calendar. Holiday-aware window per rule. Supports realistic team availability rather than fictional 24/7 coverage.

Avoid

The failure mode is window-bounding customer-impacting alerts. If a customer is hurt at 3 AM, the alert stays pageable. Sleep is not a reason to drop a page that names real customer pain. Quarterly audit catches creeping severity in the windowed pool.

• No window on customer-impacting alerts. Window-bounding customer pain hides outages. Non-negotiable rule.
• 3 AM customer pain stays pageable. "If it hurts customers at 3 AM, still pageable" test. Sleep is not a reason to drop the page.
• Visible "windowed" tag. Explicit policy tag per windowed alert. Supports auditing and catches mis-tagging.
• Quarterly window audit. Windowed-alert review per quarter. Catches alerts whose severity has crept up since the window was set.