Keep notifying a given user until ACKed, possible?

Thomas Raynal

Hello,

We are currently trying opsgenie, for basic on-call alerting. There is lot to like, but we could not find how to handle the following situation :

In the middle of the night, a drowsy on-call engineer receives a notification, check her phone and sees the related alert.
Half-asleep still, she fails to act upon it and slowly drift toward being fully asleep again.

But, as per our tests, and my understanding of the alert notifications flow, if an alert is seen by a given user, no more notification will be sent to that user to raise her from sleep, even if rules are set at either the user or the team level.

I guess it is so to avoid useless, noisy, disruptions. Yet in the situation described above, we really would like to avoid escalating immediately and be a bit more noisy and disruptive.

I am wondering if the snooze feature might help, but the relevant page does not mention any impact on the seen/unseen status of the alert. And it would necessitate that our drowsy engineer hits the snooze button in the first place, which is a bit optimistic in that scenario.

As our problem seems a fairly common one, am I missing something? Or is there some feature, like Snooze, in the other plans that would help in these situations?
Or maybe we are misusing the tool and should try to solve this problem in a completely different way?

 

 

Shivam Naik_l5gu21

Hi @Thomas Raynal ,

 

Happy to help!

 

To have alerts repeat notifications to On-Call if it has not been acknowledged by a certain time, it would be best to utilize the Repeat function on Escalation policies, since you can set the steps there specifically to process if it hasn't been Ack'd. So you might have something like this:

Where notifications are sent out to On-Call users if the alert has not been acknowledged, and will be repeated if it hasn't been fulfilled after a certain amount of time. There is also an option there to revert Acks and Seen statuses if it hasn't been closed for a certain amount of time. The Snooze function could work, but the issue there is if the On-Call user has Seen the alert at least; this functions as a tacit Ack on the alert, so they wouldn't be sent additional notifications following that, so Snooze could work if they don't look at the alert at all, but the Repeat function on the Escalation policy might be better since that will repeat the notifications, and reset if they have Seen it, but didn't take action.

 

Please let me know if that option will work for you, and I will follow up!