GoAlert Features

Background

GoAlert makes use of services, escalation policies, schedules, and rotations to determine who should receive an alert notification. First, lets define these terms.

• A service is what you send all your alerts to. Think of it as the alert listener. A service can receive alerts via an API call or an inbound email message. Alerts route to the appropriate service via an integration key that is unique to a single service. All alerts received by a service are routed to a single escalation policy.

• An escalation policy defines different steps of notification to insure someone on your team acknowledges an alert notification. Typically, teams have at least three steps on an escalation policy. The first step is the person/people primarily accountable for responding to support issues, the second step is often many other engineers on the team or an engineer in a lead role, and the third step is often the team’s manager. If one person on a step does not acknowledge the alert, it will be escalate to the next level on your team. Your team has your back.

• A schedule defines who is on-call and when that person is on-call. A manual adjustment, or override, can be applied to the schedule.

• A rotation is a list of people on your team that should rotate through the on-call schedule. A rotation can be hourly, daily, or weekly. With a weekly rotation, you’ll be the person on-call for a weeks time until you hit your specified handoff day/time.