Escalation makes sure an unanswered alert reaches someone. An on-call rotation decides who that someone is this week.
How escalation works
- An alert fires and goes to your regular channels: those without an escalation delay.
- A teammate acknowledges it, from Alertly.Net, the email button or the API. Escalation stops.
- If nobody does within a channel's escalation delay, that channel is notified too, marked as escalated.
If a rule picks its own channels, only those take part. The delay counts from when the alert was first sent (for alerts held back by a maintenance window, from when the window ends). Channels that were escalated to also get the recovery notice.
You can chain several escalation channels with growing delays:
| Channel | Escalation delay |
|---|---|
| Team Slack channel | none (always notified) |
| Lead's phone push | 15 minutes |
| Email to the CTO | 1 hour |
Resolved alerts never escalate.
On-call rotation
Owners and admins can set up a rotation in the On-call rotation section of the team settings:
- Who takes turns: the members in the rotation, in order.
- Each turn lasts: 1 day, 1 week or 2 weeks.
- Starting on: when the first turn begins. Turns hand over at 09:00 UTC.
The team settings show who is on call and when they hand over; the dashboard shows who is on call. Email the person on call about every new alert (ticked by default) sends every new alert to that person's email as well as your channels. The email says why they received it, and it isn't affected by channel quiet hours.
To remove the rotation, untick everyone and save.
Acknowledging well
- Acknowledge as soon as you start looking, even before you know the cause. It tells your team you're on it and stops escalation.
- Add a note to the alert to share what you found.
- Turn longer problems into an incident so updates and customers can follow along.