What's an Escalation Policy?

An escalation policy ensures that if a major incident is not acknowledged or resolved within a pre-determined amount of time, it will be escalated to the next person. You can customize who you want to receive the alert, the amount of time to wait before escalating to the next user and which user the alert should be escalated to.

When is an escalation policy useful?

Imagine that you have an on-call team that monitors critical systems. In the event of an incident, an alert is sent either by a fellow team member or one of the monitoring tools connected to the hundreds of endpoints being monitored. If this alert is not acknowledged, what happens to it? OnPage solves this common problem, ensuring that critical alerts are never missed. Critical alerts are escalated until there’s a response.

The OnPage scheduler organizes on-call teams and is configured according to the team’s escalation and failover policies, automating the alerting process and reducing human error.

escalation policy

Escalation Policy

 

OnPage: Escalations and Critical Messaging

OnPage is perfect for critical messaging and has powerful features to set up escalation policies. OnPage provides:

  • High-priority alerts that bypass the silent switch on all devices
  • Configurable, intelligent escalation policies
  • Easily distinguishable, prioritized mobile alerts
  • Two-way messaging with rich content and attachments
  • Contact sync-up
  • One monthly fee covers unlimited global messaging
  • Secure, encrypted communication
  • Remote data wipe of sensitive information
  • Repeated alert delivery

Check out the comparison page to see how OnPage matches up against email and pager communications.

Creating Escalation Groups

In this video, learn how OnPage allows administrators to create escalation groups through its cutting-edge web management console. Modify escalation orders when there is a change in on-call resource availability.

Download: Mastering Escalation Management

IT teams know that strong escalation policies are like the net under an acrobat. Policies ensure that if an alert is not heard or cannot be handled by the recipient, the alert won’t fall out of view and suffer a quick demise.

However, what are the best ways to incorporate escalation policies while not encouraging teams to shirk responsibility?

Our latest white paper, “Mastering Escalation Management,” looks into this conundrum by highlighting:

  • Use of runbooks
  • Avoiding the use of email
  • Use of messaging applications integrated with persistent alerting capabilities

Escalation policy

OnPage Customer Testimonial 

 

“The escalation process has come in handy several times when our on-call person’s phone was having issues. A supervisor was alerted after an hour of the page not being opened by the on-call person. Also, the ability to select different alert sounds is nice … OnPage is just a reliable system.”

– Stan R. | OnPage Customer in IT

 

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