Escalation Is a State Machine, Not a Phone Tree

The worst on-call hour starts with a missed fact, not a missed phone call. You see the alert, skim three paragraphs of a runbook, and run the wrong command first—or skip the freeze window entirely—and the incident gets worse. The fix is to model escalation as a state machine and let each alert carry the context needed to move to the next state. Escalation isn't a sequence of phone numbers; it's a transition between states. In this post I'll show you how to encode alerts, first commands, escalat