What is an escalation policy?
Also called: escalation chain
Escalation policy is an ordered list of levels that defines who is notified about an alert, through which channels, and how long to wait for an acknowledgement before moving to the next level.
An escalation policy is an ordered list of levels that says who is notified about an alert, through which channels, and how long to wait for an acknowledgement before moving to the next level.
A typical policy pages the person on call at level 1. If there is no response after 10 minutes, level 2 pages the secondary or the whole roster. After another 15 minutes, level 3 pages an engineering lead. A level can target a person, whoever is on call on a roster, or a channel such as Slack, Telegram, WhatsApp, email or push.
Acknowledging the alert stops the escalation. Every monitor and integration binds to a policy. If none is chosen the account default is used.