Secondary on-call
GlossaryWritten by Burak YEditorial review by Burak YLast editorial review 3 September 2026
A backup responder who receives escalation or supports the primary. The secondary's value depends entirely on independence: if the same person, phone, network or notification channel sits behind both roles, the fallback fails in exactly the situations it exists for.
In practice
A policy lists the same engineer as primary on one schedule and secondary on another. When their phone is out of signal, both steps of the escalation path fail together.