Transferring Alerts Between Teams

Eric Sletten

We have used OpsGenie for a couple of years on a very limited basis.  Mostly individual groups using it for their own things without a lot of centralized standards.  We're now expanding the use to all of IT, integrating it with ServiceNow and in general using it more as intended.  

One issue that we're we're trying to head off before it happens is that when users want to add another team as a responder, or create an alert for another team, they have the option to add teams, escalations, schedules or users.  Which is great, but it also opens up the possibility that they could send it to the wrong place and either have the notification missed because no routing rule exists or it could just be handled incorrectly (too aggressive / or not of a escalation policy).

How is this usually handled?  Naming standards for common cross-team communication along with documentation and standards?  Simply relying on educating users?  Other ideas?

Ronnie Kingston_snohup

Hello Eric, 

There could be many ways to handle this scenario based on how each organization's alert handling policy is defined. 

I can suggest a method to not "miss" an alert just because it was incorrectly routed or assigned. 

You can go to your team's escalation policies and make the policy repeat itself even if the alert was acknowledged. The repetition happens until the alert is closed. 

The on-call person can then decide whether to take action on the alert or add another team as the new responder to the alert. The newly added team can then undertake further actions to address the alert. Once the issue is addressed, they will need to close the alert.

In this way, you can avoid an alert being routed to a dead-end. I hope this helps with your requirement.