Frequently Asked Questions

What is Flashduty?

Flashduty is an all-in-one alert response platform. We provide IT professionals with on-call scheduling, alert noise reduction, escalation, and automation capabilities to accelerate incident response and minimize losses.

Is Flashduty right for me?

You should use Flashduty if your organization or team has the following needs:

Need a centralized place to collect, manage, track, and analyze alerts from all sources within your company.

Need to classify alerts and notify key personnel through different channels dynamically, with automatic escalation processes to prevent unhandled alerts.

Spend most of your time handling alerts and need noise reduction solutions to address alert fatigue.

What are active and inactive users?

FlashDuty pricing model is based on the number of purchased licenses, with each license corresponding to an active user account. For example, if you only purchase one license, only one member can use all FlashDuty features. However, you can still invite more members to join, but only members with licenses can become active users and enjoy all features. The specific differences are as follows:

Active User

A user who has used the product in the current month is considered an active user, with each active user occupying one license. The count resets at the beginning of the next month.

Logging in will occupy one license, making the user an active user.

When an active user is deleted, their corresponding license will be released.

Active users have full access to all features (subject to version and role permission limitations).

Active users can transfer their own license to other inactive users.

Inactive User

Inactive users do not have any feature usage permissions, including viewing incident lists/details, only passively receiving alert messages via email, SMS, and IM group messages.

In the configuration of the escalation policy, you can choose to notify the incident message to inactive users.

Inactive users cannot view or close incidents.

Inactive users share the email, SMS, and phone notification quota with active users.

When logging in to the console for viewing/processing, they will be prompted with no permissions.

What notification methods does Flashduty support?

Channel	Direct Message	Group Chat
Voice	✅
SMS	✅
Email	✅
Feishu/Lark App	✅	✅
Dingtalk App	✅	✅
WeCom App	✅
Slack App	✅	✅
Microsoft Teams App	✅	✅
Feishu/Lark Bot		✅
Dingtalk Bot		✅
WeCom Bot		✅
Zoom Bot		✅
Telegram Bot		✅

Does Flashduty use fixed numbers for voice notifications?

Mainland China: (010)21364727, (021)32017538, (010)21364713 and (010)21364708, more numbers can be downloaded and imported to your phone from: https://download.flashcat.cloud/phone.vcf

United States, Canada: 13152319335

Indonesia, Germany, Malaysia, Australia, Singapore, Thailand, Russia, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan: Random numbers

Other regions are not currently supported for voice notifications. If you have requirements, please contact us: contact-us@flashcat.cloud

How does Flashduty ensure I receive notifications?

Flashduty strives to ensure the availability of every notification channel.

Voice, SMS, and Email: We use highly available services from multiple cloud providers and can quickly switch to another if one experiences issues.

IM App Messages: If IM app direct messages fail to send, the system will fall back to SMS and email notifications.

Escalation Rule Settings: We recommend setting up loop notifications where the system will notify multiple times if an incident isn't acknowledged. Alternatively, set up escalation levels where the incident will be assigned to the next level if current responders don't handle it promptly.

Why am I not receiving voice notifications?

Voice calls are highly dependent on terminal signals and settings. If you consistently can't receive voice notifications, try these steps:

If you're using a phone number registered outside mainland China, check our supported regions.

Check if your phone's blocklist or call history has blocked numbers around the time of the call, usually starting with 010xxx or 021xx. If found, remove them from the blocklist and whitelist them.

If no blocklist is found, your phone number might have blocking services enabled: China Mobile users can check blocked fixed-line calls through the WeChat public account "China Mobile High-frequency Harassment Call Protection"; China Telecom users might experience call blocking when receiving SMS, check through "Tianyi Anti-harassment" public account; China Unicom users can check through "WO Assistant" public account or contact customer service.

If you've participated in number portability, please check blocking settings with multiple carriers.

Try restarting your phone, reinserting your SIM card, or testing the SIM card in another phone to rule out terminal or SIM card issues.

If you still can't identify the cause, please contact us.

Why am I not receiving email notifications?

Try these steps:

Check your email client's spam folder. If found there, move the emails to inbox and mark as not spam

Check if your email client has auto-delete rules set up. If yes, modify the rules

Contact your company's email administrator to check if emails are being blocked (Enterprise email services like Gmail have strict limitations and may block frequent emails). If blocked, whitelist the email source.

If you still can't identify the cause, please contact us.

Can Flashduty route alerts based on alert fields?

Yes, Flashduty allows you to match multiple dimensions of alert events, including labels, severity, title, and description, and route them to different channels. See Integration Center - Integration Details - Route Configuration.

What alert systems can Flashduty integrate with?

Generic Integrations: Email alerts (works with almost all alert systems); Custom Event Standard (for self-developed monitoring systems).

Open Source Integrations: Zabbix, Prometheus, Nightingale, and other common open-source monitoring tools.

Commercial Integrations: Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, Huawei Cloud, AWS, Azure, and other commercial cloud monitoring services.

If you have other requirements, please feel free to contact us.

How does Flashduty charge?

We charge based on active users and offer three different versions: Free, Standard, and Enterprise. For detailed comparison, visit: https://flashcat.cloud/flashduty/price/

We define active users as those who use commercial features in the current month, requiring a license.

At the end of each monthly cycle, active users' licenses are released and must be reclaimed for the next cycle.

When a member is deleted, their license is automatically released.

Viewing alerts requires a license; passively receiving notifications does not.

How does Flashduty ensure its own stability?

Flashduty SLA:

Feature Availability: Core features must be available 99.95% of the time

Delivery Efficiency: 99.95% of alerts must be delivered within 5 minutes of triggering

How Flashduty maintains SLA:

Multi-active in Same City: Infrastructure built across multiple data centers, with stateful components all multi-active in the same city

Asynchronous Processing: Alerts enter async processing immediately after submission, with retry mechanisms to reduce alert loss risk

Redundant Notifications: Provides redundant notification mechanisms for important alerts, with optional multiple channel loop notifications

Global Acceleration: Enabled for api.flashcat.cloud domain to ensure stable reporting from all locations

Continuous Monitoring: Comprehensive system metrics collection, regular stress testing to identify system issues proactively

How does Flashduty ensure data security?

Full-stack HTTPS ensuring secure data transmission

Encrypted storage for sensitive information, logs stored with sensitive data masked

MFA verification required for important data modifications, with operation audit support

Regular participation in internationally recognized third-party security certification audits (ISO27001, ISO9001)

NDA available for clients who require it

Does Flashduty support on-premises deployment?

Yes, Flashduty offers an on-premises version nearly identical to the SaaS service. However, due to high maintenance costs, on-premises deployment has a different pricing model than SaaS. Unless necessary, we recommend using our cloud service.

Please contact us if you need the on-premises version.

What advantages does Flashduty have over other platforms?

We provide more flexible and user-friendly features

We offer more professional and attentive service

We provide more reasonable product pricing

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