I wrote a system that allows that kinda thing, you'd fire a message saying "Hey alert me if you don't hear again in the next five minutes". This kinda heartbeat can be submitted via cron from servers, etc.
Alerts can then be fired if deadlines are missed, and you can submit your own id/title/timeout period. If you wanted it to route alerts you'd just say "raise the alert now" rather than "+5m", or whatever.
https://github.com/skx/purppura
Development kinda stopped, but the system worked and had a flexible notification system - so you could email, use pushover, etc, etc - as well as a HTTP user interface so you can view pending/raised alerts.
Related, and linked in my repo, is the similar tool Nanny which has more native integrations but the same basic idea: