Definition
Plain language
Automatically alerting a human on call, day or night, that something needs attention.
As stated in the literature
Escalation of an alert to an on-call responder via an incident-management system; a paging threshold defines what the production monitoring stack treats as serious enough for human review.
Also called: page a human, paged
Why it matters: Where the paging threshold sits determines whether a real incident gets a human within minutes or sits unnoticed until morning.
For example, when error rates on a payment service spike at 3 a.m., the monitoring system wakes the on-call engineer's phone until someone acknowledges it.
Heard on the show
“So when the Implementer is wiring up, say, a paged KV cache, it's not deriving the design from first principles.”Episode 027 — When AI Agents Build the Serving Stack: A Bet on Bespoke Infrastructure