Configuring an Escalation Policy

This article describes the steps and prerequisites required to configure an escalation policy to assign and escalate to primary or secondary on-call users about critical Situations or ActOns.

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. Click  the gear icon at the top (or) hover over  icon at the top left corner.
2. In the bottom of the left menu, click Configurations.
3. In the left menu, under Signal Management, click Escalation Policies.
4. From the Escalation Policies page, click Add New Escalation Policy.
5. Give a Name for your policy and enter a Description (Optional).
6. Search and select the targets (i.e Users and Schedules) you want to notify when a Situation or ActOn triggers.
7. 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 an ActOn escalates to the next level in the move to next step 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.
8. Click Add a new Escalation Rule to create the second level.
9. Search and select the target(s)you want to notify when a Situation or ActOn triggers.
10. Configure additional escalation rules as required.
11. If this policy is to be repeated, then mark the check box next to If no one acknowledges, repeat this policy after ___ times. You can add as many times as you want.
12.  Select the Use default escalation template check box. If this check box this selected, the default template will be used to send the preconfigured text in this template to users. 
13. Clear the Use default escalation template check box. This displays the following two fields:
14. Select the Escalation Mode. Possible values:
    • SMS
    • Voice call
15. Select the Escalation Template from the list. Based on the selected mode, the escalation templates created for the particular mode are displayed in the drop-down. 
16. Click Submit and then add a note. After the escalation policy is created, you can view this policy in the Escalation Policies list. 

Multi-user Notifications

Our escalation policy framework is designed in such a way that only one user is notified at once, but in practice, it is required to notify multiple users at the 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 for multiple users at a time based on your requirements.

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

An escalation timeout is a time in which a user must acknowledge an ActOn before it reaches the next level. By default, this timeout is a minimum of 5 minutes.