How to set up escalation and acknowledge incidents

Escalation lets some alert channels wait. They are only alerted if the outage is still going and nobody has acknowledged the incident. A common setup:

• Slack right away: the team sees it first.
• Push to whoever is on call after 10 minutes, only if nobody has picked it up.

Set a delay on a channel

1. Open Alert channels in the sidebar.
2. Open the channel’s menu and choose Edit.
3. Under When to alert, choose Right away, or wait from If down for 5 minutes to If down for 1 hour.
4. Choose Save changes.

You can also set When to alert when you add a channel.

Acknowledge an incident

• In the app: open the incident under Incidents and choose Acknowledge.
• In Slack: press Acknowledge on the outage alert, in a channel added with Add to Slack.

Acknowledging tells the team someone is on it and cancels delayed alerts that haven’t gone out yet. If the monitor recovers before the delay is up, the delayed alert is never sent either.

Measure it

Incidents shows MTTA, the average time to acknowledge, and MTTR, the average time to recover, for the last 30 days. More on incident management.