<p>We’ve recently added support for “<a href="http://www.opsgenie.com/public/features/escalations.html">escalations</a>" in OpsGenie. Escalations typically refer to notifying different users at different times until the alert is seen and processed (acknowledged) by someone, or problem is resolved and the alert is closed. If the user who gets notified first resolves the problem, or determines the problem is not urgent, etc. other users don’t have to be notified. <strong>Since escalations allow notifying only a subset of the users for alerts initially, they can be quite useful in reducing “alert (notification) noise” while still ensuring alerts don’t fall through the cracks.</strong> OpsGenie supports both “rules based” and “ad-hoc” escalations. You can create <a href="http://support.opsgenie.com/customer/portal/articles/912552-escalations">escalation rules</a> that specify who should be notified when; You can then use the escalation rule as the recipient of an alert, instead of specifying users or groups directly. For example, the following escalation rule would notify user “fili” as soon as the alert is created, and if the alert is not acknowledged within 10 minutes, OpsGenie would notify the members of the “web_team” group.</p><p><img alt="image" src="http://media.tumblr.com/d514e644f3e6da1ad34607ab1118fe9b/tumblr_inline_mu3g40EElO1soq1dj.png"/></p><p>Escalation rules are quite useful when there is a predefined agreed on escalation process, however it is not always clear how an alert should be escalated. Who should be notified? An escalation rule like the one in the example above would notify all the members of the web_team group. Wouldn’t it be better if only the right person is notified instead? Of course, this is not always possible nor desirable, but in most cases, the first responder may be able to determine to whom to escalate the problem to. In these situations, “<a href="http://www.opsgenie.com/blog/2012/12/27/alert-lifecycle-management.html">ad-hoc escalations</a>" provide the opportunity <strong>further reduce the noise by empowering users to control the escalation path</strong>. So what do we mean by ad-hoc escalations? We refers to the set of features that enable users to notify additional people using alert actions. The recipients of an alert can either “assign” the ownership of an alert to a user, or add others to the alerts as recipients. In either case, OpsGenie would notify the additional users according to their notification preferences. As it is with any alert related activity, these actions are tracked by OpsGenie and users can see, who were notified, who has seen the alert, etc. in the recipients section and in the alert log. Reducing alert noise is essential in ensuring operations folks (and whoever else participates in operations) do not get overwhelmed with high number of alerts. At OpsGenie, our goal is to provide the tools that may help ops folks to minimize the number of interruptions (during the day or night) and hope that you can use escalations to do just that. <br/><br/><a href="http://twitter.com/berkay">@berkay</a></p>![]()
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