On-Call Rotation

Why It Matters

When a critical vulnerability report lands at 2 AM, someone needs to be clearly responsible. The on-call schedule identifies who is responsible for triage and lets successive team members take that role.

Getting Started

Navigate to VDP > On-Call in the sidebar. The page shows who is currently on-call and lets you configure how shifts are managed.

Modes

Mode	Best for
Manual	Small teams. Start and end shifts by hand.
Scheduled Rotation	Teams with 2+ members. Shifts advance automatically.

Manual Mode

Any admin can start or end a shift from the On-Call page or the dashboard. Shifts run until someone explicitly ends them.

If a shift runs too long, the dashboard shows a warning:

• 24+ hours: amber warning
• 48+ hours: red warning prompting a handoff

Scheduled Rotation

Set an interval (daily or weekly), a handoff day and time, and add your team members in the order they should rotate. When you save, the first person in the list goes on-call immediately.

At each handoff time, the current person’s shift ends and the next person’s begins automatically. After the last person, the rotation wraps back to the first.

Manual Override

You can always switch the on-call person by hand during a rotation. An “override” badge appears so the team knows it was a manual change. The rotation resumes normally at the next scheduled handoff.

Auto-Assignment

Enable Auto-assign new reports to the on-call person to route incoming reports directly to whoever is on-call. If no one is on-call, reports go to the default assignee (configured in Program Settings > Triage).

Notifications

The on-call person receives alerts for:

Event	Email	Slack DM
New report submitted	✓	✓
SLA at risk	✓	✓
SLA breached	✓	✓
Critical severity escalation	✓	✓
Appeal received	✓	✓
Shift started	✓	✓
Shift ended	✓	✓

Each alert arrives once: as a Slack DM if you can receive one, otherwise by email.

Shift notifications fire on every transition: scheduled rotation, manual start/end, PagerDuty sync, even when a member leaves the team mid-shift.

Slack alerts arrive as personal direct messages to whoever is on call. They require a connected workspace under Integrations > Slack (with the Personal notifications feature toggle enabled), a Kit email that matches a workspace member, and a connection at the Collaboration or Full permission level.

Unlike hiring DMs, on-call DMs can’t be paused; they follow the schedule. To stop receiving them, hand off your shift or enable Holiday Mode, which advances the rotation automatically. Each DM includes Hand off and Enable holiday mode links for exactly that.

Shift Summary and Handoff Brief

Going off call includes a recap of your shift in the DM and email: new reports (with severity breakdown), status changes, researcher messages, bounties awarded, SLA breaches during your shift, and what you’re handing off (open reports and how many still await triage).

Going on call includes a handoff brief of the queue you’re inheriting: open reports, reports awaiting triage, and reports whose acknowledgment SLA is at risk right now.

When Nobody Can Take a Breach

A report that misses its acknowledgment SLA pages whoever is on call (see Breach Alerts for the other channels). Kit can also tell your program admins, on the first breach alert, if:

• nobody is on call, or
• nobody owns the report.

This is off by default. Turn it on with Escalate SLA breaches to program admins under Program Settings → SLAs. It is a separate switch from Escalate to program admins, which covers stalled reports only.

Every admin gets an in-app notification. Admins who haven’t turned off Security escalations in their email preferences also get an email. If none of them can receive it, the email goes to the Contact Email from your security.txt settings, or your billing email if that is blank.

Reports assessed as Informational page nobody.

Who an Alert Reached

Every SLA alert is logged on the report timeline with who it reached, for example SLA breached · paged Dana (on call) · posted in the report’s Slack thread. An alert that reached nobody reads reached no one because nobody was on call, and admins get a Set up on-call link right there. The same record is in the report’s PDF dossier and in the timeline your AI assistant reads over MCP.

Quick Checklist

• Choose Manual or Scheduled Rotation
• If rotation: add at least 2 team members and set the handoff schedule
• Optionally enable auto-assign for incoming reports
• Connect Slack for direct message notifications
• Keep someone on call, or turn on Escalate SLA breaches to program admins so a breach still reaches someone