Add an escalation policy to your team

Add an escalation policy for your team so that at least one team member is engaged in an alert response.

Before you begin

Role required: Responder, Manager, or Administrator

Note: Only the responder who created the team, the manager of the team, or an administrator can add an escalation policy for the team.

About this task

Escalation policy is triggered once for each active shift. For example, if there are three active shifts, escalation policy will be triggered thrice — one for each shift. Notifications are sent based on the escalation policy and only during active shift hours. Notifications are not sent to users who are on time off. When multiple users are specified as responders to an alert, escalations are used to notify responders in a given order and at a specific time. If no one responds, the escalation happens based on your defined policies until someone responds. Once a team member responds, the escalation policy stops escalating and no further notifications are sent. If there is no escalation policy, no notification is sent to the user even if the user is a primary member of an on-call shift.

Note: If the escalation policy has only one level, the notifications or the reminders are sent to the user every 5 minutes.

If the escalation policy of a team (e.g. Networking team in the image below) is set to notify the primary member on another team (e.g. Operations team in the image below), then escalation policy notifications for the Networking team is sent to all the primary on-call users in the Operations team.

Escalation policy for the Operations team.

Note: For on-call shifts at the same escalation level, notification is sent only once to any user and no duplicate notifications are sent. For example, if both the primary and backup member for a shift is the same user, an escalation notification is sent to the user only once even if the policy is set to send it to both primary and backup at the same escalation level.

Procedure

Log in to Lightstep Incident Response.
On the navigation pane, select On-call teams.
Click the team's card for which you want to add escalation policies.
Click the Escalation policies tab.
Click Add a policy.
To customize the number of reminders that you want to receive for escalation notifications, turn on the Enable reminders toggle switch and select the number from the Number of reminders drop-down list.

Note: By default, the Number of reminders is set to zero.

You can enable or disable the Enable reminders toggle switch as required. Even when the Enable reminders toggle switch is disabled, the user will receive one notification as per the escalation plan.
In the Escalation policy for section, select the type of alert or incidents, such as P1, P2 for which you need the escalation policy.
Select the user who needs to be notified and also the team.

Note: You can select a Specific user who is not a stakeholder or is currently not a part of any on-call team. If you select All shift members, then all the members of the shift, even those who are not currently on-call, will be notified.
Optional: To add more users or responders who need to be notified for that specific escalation level, click Add a responder and select the user and the team.

Note: You can select a Specific user who is not a stakeholder or is currently not a part of any on-call team. If you select All shift members, then all the members of the shift, even those who are not currently on-call, will be notified.

To delete any responder, click the delete icon ().
Optional: To add more levels of escalation to the policy, click Add an escalation level.
From the time list, select the time after which an action should be taken.
Select the user to notify and the team.

Note: You can select a Specific user who is not a stakeholder or is currently not a part of any on-call team.

To delete any escalation level, click the delete icon ().
Click Save.
Escalation policy is created.