Escalation
Understand escalation policies — how alerts move through steps when no one acknowledges an incident.
What is escalation?
Escalation is the process of notifying progressively broader groups of people when an incident is not acknowledged within a configured time. Without escalation, a single alert goes to a single channel and nothing more happens if it is missed. With escalation, missed alerts automatically notify the next person or team.
Escalation policies are available on the Standard plan and above. On the Free plan, monitors use single-channel immediate alerts.
Escalation policy anatomy
An escalation policy is an ordered list of steps. Each step defines:
- Delay — minutes to wait after the previous step before this step fires (step 1 is always immediate)
- Notification channels — one or more channels (Email, Slack, Telegram, Webhook, PagerDuty, etc.)
- Repeat — how many times to repeat this step before advancing
Example policy:
| Step | Delay | Channels | Repeat |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0 min | Telegram to on-call engineer | 1 |
| 2 | 5 min | Slack to team lead | 1 |
| 3 | 15 min | Email to CTO + PagerDuty webhook | 1 |
When an incident opens, Step 1 fires immediately. If nobody acknowledges within 5 minutes, Step 2 fires. If nobody acknowledges within 15 more minutes, Step 3 fires.
Acknowledgement
Any team member can acknowledge an incident to stop the escalation chain. Acknowledgement methods:
- Dashboard — open the incident and click Acknowledge
- Telegram — tap the Acknowledge button in the alert message
- Email — click the Acknowledge incident link in the alert email
Once acknowledged, no further escalation steps fire. The incident stays open and visible until the monitor recovers or someone manually resolves it.
What happens after all steps complete
If every step fires and no one acknowledges:
- The escalation chain ends — no further notifications are sent.
- The incident remains open and visible in the dashboard.
- It will auto-resolve when the monitor recovers, or you can resolve it manually.
No further alerts are sent after the last escalation step. Make sure your policy includes enough steps and channels to reach someone responsible.
Assigning a policy to a monitor
One escalation policy can be assigned to many monitors, but each monitor can have only one policy at a time.
- Go to Monitors and open the monitor.
- Click Edit.
- In the Alerting tab, select the policy from the Escalation Policy dropdown.
- Click Save.
Monitors without an assigned policy use simple immediate alerts: all configured notification channels are notified at once, with no escalation.
Maintenance windows
Active maintenance windows suppress all alerts and escalations for the selected monitors. If an incident opens during a maintenance window, the escalation chain does not start.
Related
Was this page helpful?