Escalation Policies

An escalation policy defines different steps of notification to insure someone on your team acknowledges an alert notification. If no one on the current step of an escalation policy acknowledges the alert within the wait time you configure, GoAlert will escalate the alert to the next step on the escalation policy. When you reach the last step of an escalation policy, you can optionally configure GoAlert to start back at step one.

An escalation policy step can include schedules, rotations, and users.

Create an Escalation Policy

  1. On the left navigation bar, select Escalation Policies.
  2. Select the + in the lower right.
  3. Fill out the requested information and select Submit.

Configuring an Escalation Policy

You’ll likely need to make a number of adjustments to your escalation policy right after it’s created. The most common adjustments include adding a schedule to a step and adding steps.

Steps

A step on an escalation policy is used to determine who to notify first (step 1), next (step 2), last (step 3), etc. When a service routes an alert to an escalation policy, everyone who is on step 1 will receive a notification according to the user’s notification rules.

To add a step to the escalation policy:

  1. Go to the + in the lower right and then select the schedule, rotation, person or slack channel that you would like to that step.
  2. If you are adding a slack channel, you must invite GoAlert to your slack channel first by doing this /invite @GoAlert to the channel you want to use.
  3. When selecting a schedule or a rotation, begin typing the name of your existing schedule or rotation and select the one(s) you want.
  4. When you hit Submit whatever you have selected will be added to the step.
  5. If you need to edit a step, click on the elipsis on the right of the line, and edit or delete
  6. If you need to change the order of the steps, just drag and drop

Each step has a configurable wait time before the next level is notified. If no one acknowledges the alert within the configured wait time, the person or people on the next step will be notified. You can configure the wait time as well. By default, the wait time is set to 15 minutes.

At the bottom of the Escalation Steps table, you’ll see a configurable Repeat up to option. The repeat option means that if all steps on an escalation policy are executed and no one has acknowledged the alert, go back to step 1 and replay the steps up to the configured repeat limit. To edit the repeat number, click on the elipsis at the top of the page.

GoAlert will keep escalating an issue until someone acknowledges the alert or the configured repeat limit has been reached.