Glossary · Incidents and alerting
An escalation policy is a set of rules for who gets alerted, in which order and after how long, when an alert isn’t acknowledged or an incident isn’t resolved.
A typical policy alerts the person on call first, a second person after 10 to 15 minutes without acknowledgement, and a team lead after 30. Each step widens the circle only when the previous one didn’t respond.
Acknowledging is what stops the escalation, so it should take one tap from the alert itself. Without it, everyone is paged for every incident, and alerts become noise.
Escalation can also follow duration: post to the team chat at once, and page someone only if an outage lasts more than a few minutes.
In Uptimecheck each alert channel can wait 5 to 60 minutes and alert only if the outage is still going and nobody has acknowledged it: for example Slack at once and a push to the phone after 10 minutes. Acknowledging the incident, also with the Acknowledge button in Slack, cancels escalation alerts that haven’t gone out yet. For policies with more levels, send alerts to PagerDuty.
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Guides 7 min read
False alerts teach teams to ignore monitoring. How to cut the noise: confirm every failure with a second check, set sensible timeouts, validate the right URL and route alerts to the people who can act.
ReadGuides 5 min read
How to tell customers about an outage: who speaks, how often, on which channel and in what words. A one-page plan, severity levels, update cadence and ready-to-use templates for status pages, email and social media.
ReadIt tells the team and the alerting system that someone owns the incident, which stops further escalation steps. It doesn’t resolve the incident.
Long enough to reach a laptop: 5 to 15 minutes for urgent services. Shorter steps page the second person for incidents the first was already handling.
No. Only outage alerts wait for a channel’s delay. Slow responses, certificate and domain reminders, DNS changes and server restarts reach the channel right away.
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