Configuring an Escalation Policy

Learn from the following video on how you configure an Escalation policy to assign and escalate to primary or secondary on-call users about critical situations.

Required User Permissions

The following user roles can create, edit and delete escalation policies:

• Account Owner, and Global Admin users
• Users with a Manager base role and Configuration Manager

To create an escalation policy, 

1. Navigate to Configurations --> Escalation Policies.
2. From the Escalation Policies page, click Add New Escalation Policy.
3. Give a Name for your policy and enter a Description (Optional).
4. Under Send On-Call Hand Off Notifications, select the appropriate option (i.e Always, When in use by a service) from the drop-down.
5. Search and select the targets (i.e Users and Schedules) you want to notify when a situation triggers.
6. Optional: You can then add a second level to the escalation policy, which will serve as a secondary line of responders who will be notified in the event that no one in the first level responds. To do this, enter the number of minutes that should pass before the situation escalates to the next level in the escalates after ___ min. field. This time period is called the escalation timeout. Situation will not escalate if they are acknowledged or resolved before the timeout is reached.
7. Click Add a new Escalation Rule to create the second level.
8. Search and select the target(s)you want to notify when a situation triggers.
9. Configure additional escalation rules as required.
10. If this policy is to be repeated, then mark the check box next to the If no one acknowledges, repeat this policy after ___ times. You can add as many times as you want. 
11. Click Create an Escalation Policy and then click Confirm.
12. Next, you will need to add your escalation policy to a schedule so that users can be notified of situations. 

Multi user Notifications

Our Escalation policy framework is designed in way such that only one user is notified at once, but in practice, it is required to notify multiple users at same time when an ActOn is triggered, if the primary user does not respond. To achieve this result, it is necessary to add more users to a schedule so that you can notify them at once. 

The following methods help you configure notifications to multiple users at a time based on your requirement.

• Notify multiple users at same time irrespective of their on-call status. Refer this link for more details.
• Notify multiple users or groups at a specific spans of time. For example, notify multiple users during weekend or after business hours. Refer User 3, User 4, User 5 and User 6 example in this link for more details.
• Notify a secondary user when a primary user does not respond to an ActOn within specified time. Refer this link for more details.

Notify multiple users at same time irrespective of their on-call status

To notify two or more users irrespective of their on-call status, you will need to configure an Escalation policy with multiple users on the same escalation rule.

1. Navigate to On-call Management --> Escalation Policy
2. On the Escalation policy page, click Add New Escalation Policy to add a new one or click Edit an Escalation Policy to add users in an existing one.
3. Click in the field under Notify and add one or more users to notify the required users about an ActOn when it is triggered.
4. Click Save.
5. Escalation Timeout

Escalation Timeout is a time in which a user must acknowledge a situation before it reaches the next level. By default, this timeout is a minimum of 1 minute.