Set up an escalation policy

An escalation policy is a list of steps. Each step notifies one person, a schedule or a channel, and waits for someone to acknowledge the alert before moving on.

Create the policy

1. Open On-call, then Escalation policies.
2. Click New policy and give it a name, such as “API, business hours”.
3. Add the first step. Most teams start with the current person on an on-call schedule.

Add more steps

For each step, set how long Navy should wait before escalating. Five minutes is a good default for the first step. A typical policy looks like this:

1. Page the on-call engineer by push notification and SMS.
2. After 5 minutes, call the on-call engineer.
3. After 10 more minutes, page the secondary schedule.
4. After 15 more minutes, notify the engineering lead.

Attach it to monitors

Open a monitor, go to Alerts and choose the policy. You can also attach a policy to a tag, so every monitor with that tag uses it automatically.

Repeat and resolve

Turn on Repeat to run the policy again if nobody acknowledges it after the last step. When the monitor recovers, everyone who was notified gets a recovery message.