Create and Manage Escalation Policy

Optimize incident response with effective escalation policies - Connect services to on-call schedules and ensure timely notifications. Streamline incident escalation for efficient resolution.

Escalation Policies ensure that the right people are notified at the right time. Incident notifications can be configured to escalate to Users, Squads or Schedules in a given order and time. You can create different Escalation Policies for different Services.

Prerequisites

• The User Role for the user in the Team must have the necessary permissions in order to manage Escalation Policies.

Creating an Escalation Policy

Ensure that the right Team is selected using the team picker at the top of the screen.

1. Click on Escalation Policies from the navigation sidebar

2. Click on Add Escalation Policy to create one from scratch

3. Give the Escalation Policy a Name and an optional Description

4. Add Users, Squads or Schedules as recipients of notifications at any level of the Escalation Policy

5. Enter the appropriate time for Escalate After, giving enough notice for your recipients to acknowledge the alert after which it will escalate to the next level (if defined)

Notify your team members as soon as an incident is triggered in Squadcast

If you want to notify your team members as soon as an incident is triggered in Squadcast, set the Escalate After time for the first layer of escalation (first Escalation Rule) to 0 mins. As and when an alert reaches Squadcast for the Service, an incident is created for it and the mapped users as in the Escalation Policy will get notified of it immediately based on the notification channels selected.

Escalate After and the Order of Rules

The time in (mins) input in the Escalation After text box takes the absolute time from the time of the incident creation.

That is, the time input in all the levels of escalation is calculated from the time of the incident trigger.

The order of the rules will be carried out based on the time input. That is, from the shortest to the longest time, irrespective of the order in which the rules are placed while defining.

6. There are two ways to add the medium of notification under Notification Rules:

From the dropdown, you can select either Personal or Custom

(a) Custom - As an Admin, you can select one or more of the available notification channels (Email, Push, SMS, and Phone) to explicitly specify the channel via which the mapped users need to receive the incident notifications

(b) Personal Notification Rules - Allow users to set up their preferred medium of notification for incidents

Note:

By default, Personal Notification Rules (as indicated by the Personal option in the dropdown) are enabled for all the mapped users in the Escalation Rule.

7. Use Add Rule to add a new Escalation Rule (layer of escalation) in the policy

8. Actions For Unacknowledged Incidents Repeat the _entire policy_ if no one acknowledges the incident even after the Escalation Policy has been executed fully once

Maximum Repeats Possible

You can repeat any Escalation Policy for a maximum of 3 times only.

9. For unresolved incidents

(a) Send acknowledgment reminders helps set up re-notification to work as reminders for users to resolve an incident.

On someone acknowledging an incident, that user will start receiving periodic reminders as set up, for a maximum of 48 hours from the time of acknowledgment.

To set reminder rules for re-notification,

Navigate to Escalation Policy -> Edit -> check For unresolved incidents send acknowledgment reminder every -> Enter time (in hours), along with the mode of notification -> click Save

Note:

Time input can be between 1 and 48 hours (inclusive).

To edit reminder rules for re-notification,

Go to Escalation Policy -> Edit -> Goto For unresolved incidents send an acknowledgment reminder every -> Edit the time (in hours), along with the mode of notification -> click Save

Note:

1. Re-Notification starts from the time of the latest acknowledgment.

2. Only the user who acknowledges will get the reminder.

3. Users will stop receiving notifications after 48 hours of acknowledgment.

Note:

There will be two types of logs under notification logs, differentiated by the icon in the first column:

• Incident Alert

• Acknowledgment Reminder Alert

• Incident Alerts - Alert notifications are sent out for incidents to on-calls, users, or squads based on Escalation Policies or Routing Rules.

• Acknowledgment Reminder Alerts - Reminder notifications are sent out for acknowledged incidents to the user who acknowledged the incident.

(b) Set a rule to re-trigger an unresolved incident

You can also set a rule to re-trigger an incident if it is not resolved until a certain period of time.

When an incident comes in, whether it was acknowledged or not, if it is not resolved until a certain period of time, enabling this rule with a time will let the system decide if this incident needs to be re-triggered.

If the incident is re-triggered, it will be assigned to the latest escalation policy that it was assigned to previously.

This rule will specify when your incident will be re-triggered, from the time of the first trigger.

Important:

• It can be set to a maximum of 48 hrs from the time of the first trigger.

• An incident can only be re-triggered once.

10. Click on Save to save and view the Escalation Policy

Important:

If the incident has transitioned away from the Triggered state when it was assigned to a specific Escalation Policy, then the rest of the rules in the Escalation Policy will not be executed.

Editing/Deleting an Escalation Policy

1. To edit an existing Escalation Policy, click on More Options for that particular Escalation Policy

2. Choose Edit to modify the existing Escalation Policy or Delete to delete the Escalation Policy entirely

3. After modifying the Escalation Policy, click on Save

Note:

Before deleting an Escalation Policy, ensure that it is not associated with any of the Services or that there are no open incidents associated with the Escalation Policy, otherwise you will be prohibited from deleting it.

FAQs

1. Can I add members from different Teams to an Escalation Policy for my Team?

No, adding members from across Teams into an Escalation Policy is not allowed. Any member that needs to be added to the Escalation Policy for a Team must be a part of the same Team.

2. Is there a way to introduce Round Robin assignment of incidents to different entities within an escalation level?

Yes, please refer to the documentation here.