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Overview

Alert Muting lets you temporarily stop automated alert notifications addressed to you — push, SMS, phone calls, email, and Slack or Google Chat direct messages — for a short, fixed window. It’s built for alert storms: when dozens of alerts fire at once, muting lets you actually use your phone to triage, communicate, and resolve instead of dismissing a page every few seconds. A few things deliberately still reach you while muted: manually triggered pages, live call routing calls, and messages posted to shared Slack channels, Teams channels, or Google Chat spaces. See What gets muted for the full breakdown. Muting is controlled entirely from the Rootly mobile app and only affects you. Alerts are still created, routed, and escalated exactly as configured, and your teammates are paged as normal.

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How Alert Muting Works

  • It’s personal. A mute only suppresses notifications sent to you. Everyone else on the escalation policy is notified as usual.
  • It applies to your account, not a single device. Muting from one phone mutes notifications to all your devices and channels, and the mute state syncs to your other logged-in devices.
  • Alerts keep flowing. Alert creation, routing, grouping, and escalation policies are unaffected. Alerts remain visible on the Alerts screen in the mobile app and on the web while you’re muted.
  • Muted notifications are dropped, not delayed. Anything suppressed during the mute is not re-delivered when the mute ends. You’ll only be notified again if the escalation policy fires a new notification.
  • Mutes end on their own. Every mute has a fixed end time and expires automatically — there’s no way to mute indefinitely.
You won’t be notified of automated alerts while muted. Unacknowledged alerts can still escalate to the next step of the escalation policy — potentially paging your teammates. Use short mute windows and keep an eye on the Alerts screen.

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What Gets Muted

Muting only suppresses notifications addressed to you personally. Messages posted to a shared channel or space are team-wide, so they’re never suppressed — even if you’re the only person watching that channel. The other two exceptions are deliberate: a manual page means a human decided you specifically need to know, and live call routing would otherwise leave a caller waiting on hold for someone who can’t hear the phone ring.

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Mute Alerts From the Mobile App

You can open the mute screen from several places in the app:
  • Settings → Mute alert notifications
  • The Mute button next to View Alert on the You’ve been paged card
  • The mute button on an alert’s detail screen (in the action menu at the bottom)
  • The Mute action on an incoming alert push notification
1

Open the Mute Screen

Use any of the entry points above. The quickest during a storm is the Mute action directly on the push notification itself.
2

Pick a Duration

Choose how long to mute: 2, 5, 10, or 30 minutes (5 minutes is preselected). Durations are fixed presets — there’s no custom value.
3

Confirm

Tap Mute. The mute takes effect immediately across your muted notification channels and all your devices, and a confirmation shows when it ends.
Need a longer or shorter window after muting? A mute can’t be extended or shortened in place — unmute, then start a new mute with the duration you want.

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While You’re Muted

Rootly makes the muted state hard to miss so you never silently stay unreachable:
  • In-app banner — a persistent Muted banner appears above the app’s main tabs, with a countdown until the mute ends and a running count of alerts that would have paged you (for example, Muted · 3 missed alerts). Tap it to review the mute or unmute.
  • iOS Live Activity — a Lock Screen card (and Dynamic Island on supported iPhones) shows a live countdown, the most recent alert, and an Unmute button.
  • Android ongoing notification — a pinned notification shows the same countdown with an Unmute action.

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Unmute

Notifications resume as soon as any of these happens:
  • The mute window expires (automatic).
  • You tap Unmute on the in-app banner’s mute sheet. While a mute is active, the Mute button on the You’ve been paged card also reads Unmute and opens the same sheet.
  • You tap Clear mute on the mute screen (Settings → Mute alert notifications).
  • You tap Unmute on the iOS Live Activity or the Android ongoing notification — no need to open the app.
Unmuting applies to all your devices and channels at once.

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What Your Team Sees

Muting yourself never hides an alert from the rest of the team — alerts are created, routed, and escalated normally, and other responders are notified as usual. Every notification that was suppressed by your mute is recorded on the alert’s timeline as a skipped notification event, visible on both web and mobile — for example: Skipped push notification: skipped due to user notifications being muted. This gives your team a clear audit trail of who wasn’t paged and why.
Alert Muting is different from muting paging for a service under maintenance, which suppresses paging for a service’s alerts for all responders during a scheduled maintenance window. Alert Muting only affects notifications sent to you.

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Requirements

  • Rootly mobile app 2.15.0 or later.
  • On-call/alerting must be enabled for your organization — the mute entry points are hidden otherwise.
  • An on-call seat, like all mobile app functionality — see Mobile App.

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Frequently Asked Questions

No. To change the duration, unmute first and then start a new mute with the window you want.
No. Suppressed notifications are dropped, not queued. After the mute ends you’ll only be notified of new activity — including any notification the escalation policy fires again on an unacknowledged alert.
Yes. When someone deliberately pages you from Rootly, that page bypasses your mute on every channel. Live call routing calls also always come through.
No. Escalation policies run on their normal timers, and everyone else is notified as usual. If you don’t acknowledge an alert while muted, it escalates exactly as it would have if you’d simply not responded.
No. Muting is self-service only — each user can only mute and unmute themselves, from their own mobile app.
Not currently. Muting is available only in the mobile app. The web shows the skipped notification events on alert timelines but has no mute controls.

Mobile App

Download, log in, and configure push notifications — the home of alert muting.

Escalation Policies

What keeps running while you’re muted — and why unacknowledged alerts still escalate.

On-Call Notifications

Your audible and quiet notification rules for each channel.