Escalation Policies

What are Escalation Policies?

Escalation policies are PagerDuty’s tool for notifying on-call users about incidents and automating the process of incident assignment. These policies connect services to users and/or schedules and provide the ability to configure a thorough response plan to ensure an incident gets acknowledged.

Useful Links

Required Permissions

The following roles have permissions to configure, edit and delete escalation policies:

  • Account Owner
  • Admin/Global
  • Manager base roles and team roles
  • Team members who have Manager access to a specific escalation policy

Setup and Configuration

Create an Escalation Policy

  1. Go to People > Escalation Policies and select New Escalation Policy
  2. Enter a Name and Description (optional)
    1. Follow the naming standard of ITS_<Department>
  3. Under Notifiy the following users or schedules, search and select the first target of the policy (the first person or schedule to be notified when an incident is triggered)
  4. Optional: Assign via Round Robin
  5. Optional: Add a new Escalation rule. This is the secondary line of responders who will get notified if the person/schedule in rule 1 does not respond to the incident after a certain amount of time. Under each rule, change the escalates after 30 min to your preference. (In this case, if the person in rule 1 does not respond after 30 minutes, it passes along to the next person/schedule)
  6. NOTE: The FINAL rule in all escalation policies must be to notify DCOPS - add a new rule at the end of the policy and select the DCOPS user from the dropdown
  7. NOTE: Before doing anything else, you must ensure that the escalation policy is assigned to your service.
    1. Go to Services > Service Directory and select your service
    2. Ensure that your escalation policy is listed under Escalation Policy
    3. If not, go to the Settings tab and click Edit to the right of Assign and Notify
    4. Enter the correct policy under Assign to Escalation Policy
    5. Select Save changes

Usage

Edit an Escalation Policy

  1. Go to People > Escalation Policies and select the settings tab to the right of your escalation policy > select Edit
  2. Make necessary changes
    1. Assign a Team with the Select a Team dropdown
    2. Send On-Call Handoff Notifications: always or only when in use by a service; this determines when the escalation policy should send notifications for going on/off call 
      1. On-call handoff notifications notify you when you are about to go on-call (these specific details can be configured in your profile).
      2. *** This should be set to always***
  3. Select Save

Delete an Escalation Policy

  1. Go to People > Escalation Policies and select the settings tab to the right of your escalation policy > select Edit
  2. On the bottom right-hand side of the page, select the red Delete button
  3. WARNING: There is no undo for this action. When a policy is deleted, the users and schedules will no longer be associated with the service they were supporting. It is recommended to edit escalation policies rather than deleting them. Deleting a policy is best for situations when the service is no longer in use.