It keeps paging until a person says stop.
BlipNest is an incident pager for small teams. A script publishes one message, a phone rings, and it rings again — every few minutes, through the night — until somebody who is responsible acknowledges it.
Membership is by invitation while the product is being built and tested; here is why, and how to ask for one.
- 00:00published
- 00:00phone rings
- 05:00rings again
- 10:00rings again
- 12:40acknowledged
What it is for
For the things you run yourself and would rather not discover at breakfast: the backup that did not finish, the disk that filled, the certificate that expired, the deploy that rolled back. Anything that can run curl can page you.
Publish from anywhere
A topic is a name. Publish to it with one HTTP request, the blip command line, or an API token that can do nothing but publish. Repeated messages about the same thing fold into one incident instead of a hundred notifications.
The phone is the pager
A critical message plays a thirty-second alarm and repeats until it is acknowledged. Acknowledging happens from the lock screen — the app does not even have to be open — and from that moment the repeats stop for everyone.
Muting is per phone and only for messages that do not require an acknowledgement. Nothing the app offers you silences a page that is meant for you.
What the phone's operating system decides is not ours to override, so it is written here rather than discovered at three in the morning. On Android a page arrives on its own alarm channel. On iPhone it sounds through a Focus you have allowed the app into, but never through the silent switch, so the on-call phone is one you leave unsilenced.
Nobody is paged by accident
Joining a team subscribes you to nothing. Somebody assigns you to a topic, or you opt in yourself — and the two are kept apart, so an on-call shift ending can never delete a choice you made.
Being responsible means the siren, the repeats, and the power to stop an escalation. Being an observer means one quiet notification, and your acknowledgement is recorded without stopping anything.
The whole integration, for a backup job:
curl -X POST https://api.blipnest.com/v1/topics/backups/messages \
-H "Authorization: Bearer bnt_…" \
-d '{"title":"Backup failed on nas-01",
"severity":"critical",
"requires_ack":true}'Topic names are yours: backups in your team is not backups in anyone else's. The token decides which team you are publishing to, so a topic can be called whatever your team calls the thing.
How it thinks
A pager is a promise that a person will be woken. Most of what BlipNest does is refuse to break that promise quietly.
- An open incident that can page nobody says so.
- When the last responsible member leaves, or every phone is gone, the incident is marked paging nobody and the dashboard shows it in orange. It never sits there looking handled.
- Removing a member reports the cost instead of refusing.
- A departure is not something an incident may block. The dashboard tells you how many incidents are now without a responsible person, and that number stays on screen until you act on it.
- Belong to several teams; see one list.
- Incidents from every organization you are in are merged, each badged with its team, because the worst outcome in an alerting product is to be woken by something you then cannot find.
- Every account holds a second factor.
- Two-factor authentication is mandatory and cannot be turned off. An account that can wake people at three in the morning is not protected by a password alone.
- The rule is shown before you act, and the cost after.
- Who may do what is decided in one place. The dashboard and the app show you what a change will do before you confirm it, and what it did afterwards — they never guess on your behalf.
- The same alarm a hundred times is one incident.
- Messages about the same thing fold into a single incident that repeats on its own schedule. You are paged once per problem, not once per retry of the script that found it.
Why it is invitation only
BlipNest is still being built and tested. For now it runs for a small number of teams whose members were invited by somebody already in the team, so that every phone it can ring belongs to a person who asked to be there.
Being small on purpose is what lets the product be tested properly — with real incidents, real nights, and real people saying what should have happened differently — before it is opened to everyone.
Registration will open later. Until then there is no sign-up form.
Want one? Write to helloblipnestcom and say what you run and what you would like it to page you about. If you know a member already, they can invite you directly. If you have an invitation, sign in — the link in your e-mail finishes joining you.
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