An Escalation Policy defines who gets notified about an Incident, through which channels, and what happens if nobody responds. Instead of relying on a single notification and hoping someone sees it, you can configure a sequence of rules that automatically moves the notification up the chain until someone acknowledges the problem.
Escalation Policies work together with the Incidents module: when an Incident is created, you can attach a Policy to it so that the right people are notified — and re-notified — until the issue is acknowledged.
Note: The Escalation Policies module is currently available to account owners and admin users only. |
Requirements
Industrial and Enterprise plans.
1. What is an Escalation Policy
A Policy is made up of up to 5 sequential rules. Each rule defines:
Recipients: the users or Address Book contacts who should be notified — selected individually or by tag.
Notification methods: Email, SMS, WhatsApp, and/or Voice Call.
Repetitions: how many times to retry notifying the recipients before moving to the next rule, and how many minutes to wait between attempts.
When an Incident with a Policy assigned is created, Rule 1 runs immediately. If none of its recipients acknowledge the Incident within the configured time, Rule 2 runs — and so on, up to Rule 5.
As soon as any recipient acknowledges the Incident, the escalation stops completely, regardless of which rule is currently active.
Note: Policies are reusable. The same Policy can be assigned to multiple Events, so you don't need to rebuild your escalation chain for every use case. |
2. Creating an Escalation Policy
In the left sidebar, go to Data → Events, then click the Escalation Policies tab at the top of the screen.
Click the + button to create a new Policy.
Give the Policy a name and, optionally, a description.
Click + Add rule to create your first rule:
Select the recipients — users, contacts, or a tag.
Select the notification methods to use (Email, SMS, Voice Call, WhatsApp — you can select more than one).
Optionally, enable the rule to be repeated (and the number of possible repetitions).
Click + Add rule again to add subsequent rules — repeat for up to 5 rules total.
Click Save.
The Policy now appears in your Escalation Policies list and is ready to be assigned to an Event (as an "incident" action) or to a manually created Incident.
3. Assigning a Policy to an Event
Like Send Email, Send SMS, or Trigger Webhook, Create Incident is one of the actions you can choose when configuring an Event. Selecting it lets you create an Incident automatically whenever the Event triggers — see the Events article for an overview of how actions work in general.
To attach an Escalation Policy from here:
While configuring your Event, add the Create Incident action (or edit it, if it's already configured).
In the action's settings, use the Escalation Policy dropdown to choose an already existing policy or click on + Create new policy to create a new one.
Finish the creation of the event and save it.
From now on, whenever this Event fires and creates an Incident, the selected Policy's escalation sequence runs automatically.
Tip: You can also assign a Policy when creating an Incident manually, instead of through an Event. See the Incidents article for that flow. |
4. How acknowledgment stops the escalation
An Incident's escalation stops the moment it is acknowledged. Currently, acknowledgment is done from within the platform — an admin or owner opens the Incident and clicks Acknowledge, as described in the Incidents article.
Coming soon: Multichannel acknowledgment — confirming directly from a link in the notification email, a short link in the SMS, or by pressing 1 during a voice call. We'll update this article once it rolls out. |
5. Editing or deleting a Policy
In the Escalation Policies list, click the Policy you want to modify.
Edit any of its rules, or click + Add rule / remove a rule as needed.
Click Save to apply your changes.
To delete a Policy, click on the options button (the three dots at the right of each policy) and then on Delete.
Note: Deleting a Policy does not affect the history of Incidents that already used it — their timeline remains intact. Events that had the deleted Policy assigned will no longer escalate until a new Policy is selected. |