Escalation Policy

An escalation policy defines who gets notified about an incident, in what order, and how an unacknowledged alert escalates to the next responder.

When an incident fires, an escalation policy routes it: notify the on-call engineer first, and if they do not acknowledge within a set time, escalate to a backup or the whole team. This prevents alerts from being missed in the middle of the night.

Combined with multiple notification channels (Slack, SMS, phone, PagerDuty), escalation policies ensure the right person is reached without spamming everyone for every blip.