How to prioritize alerting people in the best time zone

John Baumbach

We have some members in the team in UST and some members in PST. They are all in the same Team, which has a time zone of PST. The users' time zones are set properly.

 

An alert went off at 3 AM PST, but it went to all members simultaneously. We want it to go to people in UST first at that time, and then escalate to the PST team if it's not acknowledged after x minutes. 

 

Conversely, if an alarm goes of at 4 PM PST, it should go to the PST team first, and not the UST team until x mins. 

 

It's confusing from the documentation how best to set this up. Is it separate teams? With different escalation policies? But how to swap the team that is alerted first based on when the alert happens?

 

Darryl Lee_2jimne

Hi @John Baumbach ,

This is Darryl, I am here to help.

Understand that you would like to have your escalations based on the time an alert is created.

In your case, I would suggest separating those teammates who are based in UST and PST into two different timezones individually and incorporating the 2 different Routing Rules of the team to set up the time constraints and the 2 Escalation Policies to triage.

For Schedules

Please add two individual schedules with the timezone set up correctly and add the team members from these 2 different timezones into the right schedules.

For example:

For Escalation Policy

Please add 2 different Escalation policies for handling 2 different escalation paths for your descripitons:

An alert went off at 3 AM PST, but it went to all members simultaneously. We want it to go to people in UST first at that time, and then escalate to the PST team if it's not acknowledged after x minutes. 

Conversely, if an alarm goes of at 4 PM PST, it should go to the PST team first, and not the UST team until x mins. 

For example:

For Routing Rule

This is where the time constraints are set.

Please add at least 1 Routing Rule to set up the time constraint for 3AM to 4PM PST and route the alerts to the Escalation policy you set up for handling the alerts created at 3AM PST.

For example:

At the end of the setup, the screen should be looking like this:

Whenever an alert is created between 3AM-4PM PST and assigned to this team

-> Opsgenie routes this alert to the 3AM PST escalation policy following the Routing Rule

-> and this 3AM PST escalation policy will firstly route the alert to the on-call user at 3AM PST Schedule

-> if not acknowledged within 10 mins, the alert will be escalated to the on-call user in 4PM PST Schedule.

---

The main concept here is to follow this sequence: Routing Rule with time constraints -> Escalation Policy -> On-call Schedule for triaging the alerts properly.

Please adjust the details that are close to your actual condition and expectation.

Here I attach some useful documents for your reference:

Alert Notifications Flow

Configure a team dashboard

Should you have any further inquiries or issues, please feel free to reach out to Opsgenie Support Team and my colleague will help you from there.