Escalation policies

Support Operations documentation page for Pagerduty escalation policies

What are Pagerduty escalation policies

As per Pagerduty:

Escalation policies connect services to individual users and/or schedules and they ensure the right people are notified at the right time.

Creating an escalation policy

The steps to create an escalation policy in Pagerduty are:

  1. Login to pagerduty
  2. Hover over People and click Escalation Policies to go to the escalation policies page page
  3. Click the blue New Escalation Policy button on the top-right of the page
  4. Enter a name for your escalation policy
  5. For the description, enter something sensible that makes it clear what it is for. Ensure you add the issue link that caused the creation.
  6. Set Send On-Call Handoff Notifications: to when in use by a service
  7. For the first escalation rule:
    1. Set the Notify the following users or schedules to use the schedule or persons for the first level of escalation (if the schedule does not exist yet, use Support Ops Bot as a placeholder).
    2. Set the escalates after xx min. (must be at least 1 minute for a single target.) value to what is appropriate for the request.
  8. Click the blue plugs button (or the blue Add a new Escalation Rule to add a second escalation rule
    1. Set the Notify the following users or schedules to use the schedule or persons for the first level of escalation (if the schedule does not exist yet, use Support Ops Bot as a placeholder).
    2. Set the escalates after xx min. (must be at least 1 minute for a single target.) value to what is appropriate for the request.
  9. Repeat step 8 to add more escalation rules is needed
  10. Click the checkbox next to If no one acknowledges, repeat this policy xx times and set it to 5
  11. Click the blue Save button on the bottom-right of the page
  12. Update the escalation listing

Editing an escalation policy

The steps to edit an escalation policy in Pagerduty are:

  1. Login to pagerduty
  2. Hover over People and click Escalation Policies to go to the escalation policies page page
  3. Use the search on the right-hand side of the page to search for the escalation policy you wish to edit
  4. Click the blue text of the escalation policy once located
  5. Click the Edit Escalation Policy button on the top-right of the page
  6. Make the needed modifications
  7. Click the blue Save button at the bottom-left of the page
  8. Update the escalation listing

Deleting an escalation policy

Note No schedule or user can be using the escalation policy for it to be deleted. You might need to edit it first to remove rules and persons first.

  1. Login to pagerduty
  2. Hover over People and click Escalation Policies to go to the escalation policies page page
  3. Use the search on the right-hand side of the page to search for the escalation policy you wish to edit
  4. Click the blue text of the escalation policy once located
  5. Click the Edit Escalation Policy button on the top-right of the page
  6. Click the red Delete button on the bottom-right of the page
  7. Update the escalation listing

Current escalation policies used by support

Customer Emergency Rotation

  • Escalation policy link
  • Level 1
    • Notify the following users or schedules
      • Customer Emergencies - AMER Group 1
      • Customer Emergencies - AMER Group 2
      • Customer Emergencies - AMER Group 3
      • Customer Emergencies - EMEA
      • Customer Emergencies - APAC Group 1
      • Customer Emergencies - APAC Group 2
      • Shadow - Customer Emergenices
    • Escalates after 10 min
  • Level 2
    • Notify the following users or schedules
      • Support Manager - AMER
      • Support Manager - APAC
      • Support Manager - EMEA
    • Escalates after 5 min
  • Level 3:
    • Notify the following users or schedules
      • Shaun McCann
      • Lee Matos
      • Lyle Kozloff
      • Val Parsons

Customer Support SSAT

Incident Management - CMOC Rotation

  • Escalation policy link
  • Level 1
    • Notify the following users or schedules
      • Incident Management - CMOC (AMER)
      • Incident Management - CMOC (EMEA)
      • Incident Management - CMOC (APAC Group 1)
      • Incident Management - CMOC (APAC Group 2)
      • Shadow - Incident Management - CMOC
      • Support Managers - AMER
    • Escalates after 10 min
  • Level 2
    • Notify the following users or schedules
      • Support Manager - AMER
      • Support Manager - APAC
      • Support Manager - EMEA
    • Escalates after 5 min
  • Level 3:
    • Notify the following users or schedules
      • Shaun McCann
      • Lee Matos
      • Lyle Kozloff
      • Val Parsons

Incident Management - GDCMOC Rotation

  • Escalation policy link
  • Level 1
    • Notify the following users or schedules
      • Incident Management - CMOC (AMER)
      • Incident Management - CMOC (EMEA)
      • Incident Management - CMOC (APAC Group 1)
      • Incident Management - CMOC (APAC Group 2)
      • Shadow - Incident Management - CMOC
    • Escalates after 10 min
  • Level 2
    • Notify the following users or schedules
      • Support Manager - AMER
      • Support Manager - APAC
      • Support Manager - EMEA
    • Escalates after 5 min
  • Level 3:
    • Notify the following users or schedules
      • Shaun McCann
      • Lee Matos
      • Lyle Kozloff
      • Val Parsons

Support Managers

  • Escalation policy link
  • Level 1
    • Notify the following users or schedules
      • Support Manager - AMER
      • Support Manager - APAC
      • Support Manager - EMEA

US Federal Customer Emergency Rotation

  • Escalation policy link
  • Level 1
    • Notify the following users or schedules
      • US Federal On-Call
      • US Federal On-Call - Shadow
    • Escalates after 10 min
  • Level 2
    • Notify the following users or schedules
      • Support Manager - AMER
      • Support Manager - APAC
      • Support Manager - EMEA
    • Escalates after 5 min
  • Level 3
    • Notify the following users or schedules
      • Lyle Kozloff
      • Lee Matoes
      • James Lopes

Change management

As the Pagerduty changes are unique in deployment, please see Pagerduty change management for more information.

Labels to use

For all issues and MRs involving Pagerduty fields, the label Support-Ops-Category::Pagerduty should be used.

Change criticality

Due to wildly varying nature and impact adding/editing/deleting things in Pagerduty can impose, all issues/MRs related to Pagerduty need to have the their criticality manually determined

Last modified December 11, 2023: Alinging docs with PD (50707449)