Schedules & Escalation Policy Usecase

This article explains multiple ways to connect a schedule with an escalation policy by illustrating examples.

A combination of a well-defined schedule and an escalation policy helps you trigger a notification to a user or a group of users when an ActOn is generated. You can connect a schedule to an escalation policy in numerous ways to meet your team’s requirements.

Notify multiple users at specific times

Generally, in any organization with multiple teams, different activities are scheduled throughout the year at different times of the day and prolonged over a week. Some groups of users are on-call during the weekdays, some users are on-call during the weekends, and some users are on-call at different times of the day. Your main intention is to configure an escalation policy to notify individual users at a time and also notify multiple users on a daily basis at the same time.

To notify multiple users at the same time but at specific times of the day, you need to:

• Create individual on-call schedule for each user
• Add the defined schedules to a specific level of an escalation policy

To illustrate this, use the following examples:

• User 1 and User 2 are on call during business hours, Monday to Friday 0900 – 1800, and must be notified at the same time.
• User 3 and User 4 are on call after business hours, Monday to Friday 1800 – 0900, and must be notified at the same time.
• User 5 and User 6 are on call during the weekend, Friday 1800 – 0900 and must be notified at the same time.

Create individual on-call schedule for each user

Initially, you will need to create an on-call schedule for each user. The following images illustrate what these schedules look like. First, User 1 is on call during business hours, Monday to Friday 0900 – 1800 and the same configuration is applicable to User 2 as well.

User 3 is on-call after business hours during the weekdays, from 1800 to 0900 and the same configuration is applicable to User 4 as well.

User 5 is on-call after business hours during the weekends, from 1800 to 0900 and the same configuration is applicable to User 6 as well.

Add defined or existing schedules to an Escalation policy

After you have defined the schedules of multiple users within your team, you will need to add them to an escalation policy.

The following image depicts that six users have been assigned to a first level of an escalation policy. With these settings, User 1 and User 2 will get a notification when an ActOn is generated from the monitoring systems as they are put on an on-call schedule during the weekdays from Monday 09:00 to Friday 18:00.

User 3 and User 4 will be notified and assigned to an ActOn as they are put on-call schedule during the weekdays from Monday 18:00 to Friday 9:00.

On weekends, User 5 and User 6 will be notified and assigned to an ActOn as they are put on-call schedule during the weekdays from Friday 18:00 to Monday 9:00.

If no user responds within 30 minutes after an ActOn is triggered, it will be escalated to the second level, where a team manager is assigned.

Escalates to a secondary responder when primary does not respond

A necessary step is to create a secondary responder when a primary does not respond or acknowledges an ActOn for whatever reason it may be. To create primary and secondary on-call users, do the following:

• Create schedules for primary and secondary on-call users in a hierarchy
• Add each defined schedule to an Escalation Policy at different levels

Create schedules for primary and secondary on-call users

In this use case, create a schedule for a primary user followed by a secondary user at a next level in an hierarchical manner within the same schedule so that a secondary user will be notified of an ActOn when a primary user does not respond or acknowledge within a specified time limit (say, 30 minutes after an ActOn is triggered).

Add defined schedules at multiple levels to an Escalation Policy

After you have added primary users and secondary users (backup) to a schedule, you will have to add those scheduled users to an escalation policy to notify an ActOn when it is triggered. To achieve this, follow the steps shown in the image below. The common behaviors that you can expect from the below image are:

• A primary user, whoever is on-call, will be notified of an ActOn when it is triggered within 2 minutes.
• Primary user can have 30 minutes (by default) to take any action (respond, acknowledge, or reassign)
• If the primary user does not take any action within 30 minutes after an ActOn is triggered at the first level, then it will be notified to the secondary user assigned at the secondary level of an escalation policy.
• If the secondary user at second level does not take any action within 30 minutes, then the ActOn is reassigned and notified to the primary user at first level of an Escalation policy (If no one acknowledges, repeat 3 times)

Alternatively, you can add multiple users at the first level and one or more users at the secondary level while defining your escalation policy. The following image depicts two users who have been added at the first level and one user at the next level.

Schedule Layer Precedence

It is not possible to send a notification to multiple users at a time using a single schedule. Hence, you will need to add multiple users at multiple levels in a hierarchical manner—one layer for each on-call responder.

The following image depicts that two on-call responders are scheduled for different shifts. It is shown that the user at shift 2 takes precedence over the user at shift 1. Keeping this in mind, adding multiple schedules and/or users to an escalation policy is the only way to notify multiple users at once.