What are notification policies?

Notification policies give you control over how and when alert notifications are delivered to users, teams, and other responders. They also help prioritize alerts based on their urgency. Optimizing notification policies ensures your team receives timely and relevant alerts while avoiding notification fatigue.

Depending on your configuration, notifications can delay the beginning of the alert notification flow, or even close it before it notifies anyone. If you set it that way, it can restart the entire notification cycle when it ends.

Notification options

Once you set a cohort of alerts to apply the notification policy to, you choose from three setting options. You can use these options separately or combine them.

Restart alert notification flow

The Restart option allows you to initiate the notification flow after a specified period following the alert's creation, and it can be repeated multiple times for the selected set of alerts. You can repeat the notification flow up to 20 times, with intervals ranging from 0 to 10,080 minutes (equivalent to 7 days) between each repetition. This ensures that no issue goes unnoticed or unresolved.

The notification flow will restart even if the alert is acknowledged, and the notification policy will override the existing escalation or assignee of the alert. However, if the alert is closed in the meantime, it will not restart.

If your Restart setting includes Delay or turn off and Close options, their time states will refresh with each notification policy restart.

Delay or turn off alert notifications

This option is particularly valuable during change windows. You can delay an alert notification either from the moment it's created or after it's deduplicated a certain number of times.

Time based delay options

• Delay notifications for a specific amount of time: This option allows you to delay alert notifications for up to 10,080 minutes, 168 hours, or up to 7 days.

• Delaying until a certain day and time: If you choose this option, alert notifications will be suppressed until the selected time. For example, if you choose to delay alert notifications until 8:00 AM next Monday, and the alert is created on Monday at 8:30 AM, alert notifications won't be sent until the following Monday.

  • Any day: Select this option to delay alerts until tomorrow. This option will postpone alert notifications until the next day, whether it's a weekday or weekend.

  • Next weekday: If you want alert notifications to resume on the first workday after the weekend, select this option. The system will skip Saturday and Sunday and start sending notifications on the next workday.

• Turn off notifications permanently: This option permanently stops alert notifications. However, you can still view the alerts in the alerts list.

Deduplication count based delay options

When your system receives an alert with the same alias, Jira Service Management deduplicates the alert instead of creating a new one. Read more about alert deduplication.

Although the notification flow is calculated from the first moment of alert creation, deduplication time is also considered as an occurrence of an alert and it affects how the notifications are sent.

• Delay until a certain number of deduplication count: You can choose to delay alert notifications until the alert has occurred a certain number of times. When notifications are delayed or turned off, the alert will refrain from notifying its recipients. However, you can still view the alerts and take necessary actions.

• Delay until a certain deduplication count within a timeframe: Use this option to detect alerts deduplicating up to a certain number of times within a specified timeframe.

Regardless of the option you choose, if the alert is acknowledged or closed before the delay time expires, no further notifications will be sent.

Close the alert to end the notification flow

This option automatically closes the alert after a set period following its last occurrence. In other words, the close timer resets each time the alert is deduplicated. If the alert is manually closed or closed through a different rule, no further action will be taken.

The top-down priority

Similar to alert policies, the order in which you design notification policies is critical. Jira Service Management evaluates policies from top to bottom and stops applying policies when it encounters the first matching one.