Mast Pager

Mast turns your Android phone into a pager for the person who is the whole on-call rotation. Pages keep ringing until you acknowledge them, and cron jobs that go quiet page you when they stop.

Create a channel in the app and it hands you a URL. From then on, anything that can make an HTTP request can page you: a deploy script, a backup job, the error handler in your API.

curl -d "disk 92% on db1" https://mast.tissue.dev/mk_9f2a41c8b7

No account, no sign-up: install the app and that is the whole setup. The phone itself is the credential, and the channel address is the only secret. On its own the app gets two channels, one vital and a thousand messages a month. A free Tissue Mast account on tissue.systems raises that to five channels, five vitals, five probes and ten thousand messages a month, and paid plans add more phones, an on-call rotation and longer history.

FOUR LEVELS, SET PER CHANNEL

Every message has a priority, and the priority decides what the phone does with it. The channel sets the default and the ceiling: a sender can pick a priority per message, but never one above the ceiling.

- quiet: no sound, no notification. The feed keeps it.
- normal: a notification and a sound. Do Not Disturb and the channel's quiet hours still apply.
- loud: breaks through Do Not Disturb. One alert, no repeat.
- page: the pager level. It rings until you answer and moves on to the one other phone the channel names if you don't.

A PAGE THAT GETS THROUGH

A page plays the pager tone on the alarm stream, the way an alarm clock does, so it rings with the phone on vibrate or silent. It takes over the lock screen, rings again every 90 seconds from the phone's own clock, and keeps coming back from the server until somebody answers.

Android can take that away in more than one place, so the Waking you screen reads every setting a page depends on from your phone: notification permission, the Pages channel, Do Not Disturb access, the alarm volume, the lock-screen permission, battery optimisation and exact alarms. Each one that is off gets a Fix button. On phones whose battery managers stop apps on their own schedule, it links to the steps for your model.

ANSWER FROM THE LOCK SCREEN

Acknowledge, Resolve and Mute channel 1h sit on the notification and work without unlocking. Acknowledge means you have it. Resolve means it's over. Either one stops the ringing, the re-rings and the escalation.

THE WATCH BELL

A channel can also be a vital: it alerts when the posts stop. Your cron job or backup script checks in on a schedule, and silence past the schedule plus a grace window raises the alarm. The next check-in closes the page the silence opened.

A STORM IS ONE LINE

Send a message with a key and repeats of that key inside the channel's dedupe window land once. A channel that floods collapses into one row that counts up. A page is never the one folded away, and it ignores mute and quiet hours, so a flapping check can't bury a real one.

EVERY PAGE KEEPS ITS RECORD

Each message carries its own log: fired, repeated, escalated, acknowledged and by which phone, resolved. A script holding only the channel address can read back what became of its message, so a deploy can page you and wait for the tap.

RUNS APART FROM WHAT IT WATCHES

A downtime alert that runs on the machine having the downtime goes down with it. Mast's server side runs on tissue.systems, away from whatever it is watching.

Mast Pager is also on iPhone, and one account can page both.