Get started with Firewatch

Firewatch needs four connected pieces before it can page anyone:

1. an active service;
2. an on-call schedule or service owners;
3. an escalation policy assigned to that service; and
4. at least one available notification channel for each responder.

Organization access and on-call eligibility are separate. Administrators assign people as Responders when they can be scheduled or receive service-owner escalation. Stakeholders can view and collaborate without being eligible for paging.

Join or create an organization

Firewatch Cloud is designed for self-service team signup. During the prelaunch period, accept the invitation sent by your organization or follow the access instructions provided by Firewatch. Paid checkout and automatic team provisioning are not enabled yet.

On a new self-hosted installation, the first person to register becomes the organization administrator. The default Bootstrap registration mode closes registration after that account is created. Additional users join by administrator invitation.

Firewatch Cloud charges only for responders. Stakeholders do not consume a responder seat.

1. Check your profile

Open Settings → Profile and confirm:

• your name;
• your personal display time zone, or that you want to inherit the organization time zone; and
• your verified phone number when SMS or voice delivery is available.

Your profile time zone controls how Firewatch displays times and renders alert templates for you. It does not change a schedule’s time zone or handoff rules.

Open Settings → Authentication to add a passkey, set or change a password, and configure authenticator-app two-factor authentication when local authentication is available.

2. Create a service

Open Services and create the system you want to monitor. The creator becomes its first primary owner. Add other primary or secondary owners as needed.

A service can have one escalation policy. Alerts for a service without an assigned policy still create incidents, but they do not enqueue responder notifications.

3. Define coverage

Open On-call → Schedules and create a rotation:

• choose the schedule time zone and local handoff time;
• add responders in rotation order;
• use a fixed duration or an alternating coverage pattern; and
• include only the weekdays that should have coverage.

Review the result in Calendar. Excluded weekdays are real coverage gaps. Fill an intentional exception with an override; fix an accidental gap before using the schedule for production.

4. Build an escalation policy

Open On-call → Escalation policies. The first step is immediate. Later steps wait for their configured delay after the preceding step.

Each step can target:

• the responder currently resolved from an on-call schedule;
• every primary owner of the affected service; or
• all owners of the affected service.

Assign the policy to the service under Services.

5. Connect alert delivery

Firewatch attempts every deployment-enabled channel available for the targeted responder:

• email when email delivery is enabled;
• Slack when the organization workspace is connected and the responder is mapped;
• SMS and optional voice when telephony is enabled and the responder has a verified phone number; and
• each enabled organization outbound webhook.

Self-hosted administrators configure provider credentials under Admin settings. Firewatch Cloud operates the providers, while organization administrators still connect their Slack workspace and responders still verify their contact methods.

6. Send an alert

Open Alert sources, select a service, and choose an integration. Firewatch can accept its normalized alert format directly or generate an AWS SNS/SQS Lambda adapter.

Create an organization API key under Settings → API keys for external alert senders. Store the full secret immediately—it is shown only once.

Before relying on Firewatch:

1. trigger a non-production alert;
2. confirm it creates an incident for the expected service;
3. verify the expected responder and channels;
4. acknowledge it and confirm later escalation steps are skipped; and
5. send the corresponding recovery event and confirm the incident resolves.

Firewatch is under active development and is not yet a production-stable release. Test failure, retry, backup, and recovery paths for your deployment.