Escalation policies
- Shivi Sivasubramanian
Overview
When a team gets equipped to manage operations, it gets an escalation policy set by default. When an alert is assigned to a team, all team members have access to the alert and can see it on the alerts page. Jira Service Management uses the team escalation policy to determine which team member to notify by default. You can change this behavior and notify other escalations/on-call schedules by setting routing rules.
You have to be a team admin to be able to edit or add new escalation policies. You can create multiple escalation policies for the same team. When adding an escalation, designate a name, description, and rules for that escalation. Routing rules define which escalation will be processed when an alert is assigned to the team.
How do escalations work?
When multiple users or a team (with multiple members) are specified as the responders of an alert, Jira Service Management notifies each user at the same time according to their notification preferences. However, notifying users in a desired order is required in most cases, instead of notifying all of them at once. Escalation policies notify responders according to a given order. After an escalation is added as a responder to an alert, the escalation rules notify responders when the specified time is over and the state of the alert meets the specified condition.
Each escalation rule can have one of the following as its responders:
Members designated as responders
Teams
If the escalation rule is configured to have a team as its responder, routing rules of the specified team are applied while determining the notification targets.All members of a team
Admin(s) of a team or member(s) of a team
Only the default rules can be a target of an escalation.A random member of a team
Because of randomness, if this step is repeated, the same member can be chosen consecutively.On-call members of a schedule
Next member of an on-call schedule
Previous member of an on-call schedule
The default team escalation policy is a good example to understand escalations. Using this escalation policy, Jira Service Management sends notifications to the on-call user(s) first based on the on-call schedule. The on-call members can view and acknowledge or close the alert. When the alert is acknowledged or closed, the escalation policy stops. If the alert remains unacknowledged or open after a set duration, then Jira Service Management executes the second escalation step and notifies the next user in the rotation.
Add rules to an escalation policy
While adding rules to an escalation policy, specify a condition for the rule to notify its responder. Each rule has one of the following as its condition - the alert is not acknowledged or not closed. If these conditions are specified for an alert, then the escalation rule is evaluated and the responder is notified or not notified accordingly.
On your team’s profile page, scroll to the Operations section and select Get started.
Select On-call from the sidebar on the Operations page.
Select Add escalation policy if you’re doing it for the first time or the + icon in the Escalation policies section.
The following is an example escalation setup:
Select each rule to expand and edit the configuration of the escalation, such as the action being taken on the alert, the time after which action needs to be taken, and who should be notified. Each rule is added and configured via the drop-down menus and entry fields. Select + Add Rule to add a rule and Save to save each rule individually.
You also have the option to repeat escalations. Turning it on will repeat escalations after a specified duration for a specified number of times if alerts aren’t acknowledged. You can set an escalation to repeat 20 times at the maximum for a single alert.
Select Close the alert automatically when the repeats are over to automatically close the alert after the repeats are completed (even if the alert is acknowledged).
Select Change the alert status to open (even if acknowledged or seen already) on every repeat, all the states of the alert that prevent a responder from being notified are set to open while an escalation is repeating. In other words, even if the alert is acknowledged or a responder from an escalation has seen the details of the alert via the web or mobile application, the responder of the escalation rules are notified on the next repeat.