Repeat notifying the same user until alert Closed

Question

Hello,

At our company, if an alert hits, the actual on-call user will be responsible for that alert unless we assign the alert to another user. We rotate the users daily. We want to remind e.g. the on-call user from Saturday about his alert on Monday again when he actually works (even if he ACK-ed the alert already). So generally we want to achieve the following scenario:

1) We receive an alert. We determine the current on-call user from a schedule, and notify that user about the alert immediately. (This is a straightforward step.)

2) If the alert not closed yet, repeat the notification one day later for the currently assigned/Ack-er user (but preferably at 10AM on next workday) 3 times before we stop notifying.

3) if the user not closed the alert yet, repeat the notification a week later for the currently assigned/Ack-er user (preferably at 10AM on next workday from that time) 2 times before we stop notifying.

How can I achieve this? I tried many things, without success.

Some of my results based on my testing (could be wrong):

- if I try to set notification repeat for a user in his profile, it only works until he sees/ACKs the alert.

- if I set a notification rule for the team to repeat the alert, it reverts the ACK status and chooses the on-call user again, which may be a different person. This is not what we want to do, we want to notify the already determined user again.

- if I set the repeat option in an escalation rule, I can separate "until ACKed" and "until closed" notifications, but with the repeat option, the user to notify will be chosen again from the schedule on each repeat, and it will not notify the already determined user again.

I hope somebody can help me with this, what should I try?

Thank you in advance.

Shivam Naik_l5gu21 · Answer

Hi @Torma Imre ,

With the proposed system, you would need to have someone On-Call everyday to accommodate the "Previous On-Call User" rule, so if that's not possible, this won't work. Again, it does come down to the functionality of calling upon the On-Call user, being the one who is currently On-Call. The Delayed Notification Policy would be a good option for the weekends though.

To get a Feature Request created, please submit a Support ticket so that we can connect your Account to the ticket for updates from Engineering going forward. There isn't an available ETA on when that would be completed, but getting you connect to the ticket would be a good way to keep up with the progress.

Torma Imre · Answer

Thank you for your answer.

This seems only a partly solution, as I can use it with only Sundays, to delay the alert and then use the previous on-call user on Monday (which will be the on-call user from Sunday). But what about Saturdays? (or Friday evenings?) Our schedule rotates daily, usually different person is on call every day through the week.

The best outcome would be to delay all notifications of alerts created between Friday 16PM and Monday 10AM, and execute them at Monday 10AM, when everybody who might got an alert in this time interval is working again.

Based on your answer, we cannot achieve this yet.

Is there any feature plans, which we can wait for and then we can achieve this?

Or if I didn't understood it right and this is possible, then please tell me what am I missed.

Shivam Naik_l5gu21 · Answer

Hi @Torma Imre

Happy to help!

If you'd like it to notify the user who was previously On-Call for the weekend, you would need to set your Escalation Policy to "notify the Previous On-Call User in the rotation":

Functionality wise, when the Escalation policy is repeated, the On-Call user will be determined by the schedule at that time, there isn't currently a way to have it target the same user each time. By using the "Previous User" seen above though, you can target those who were On-Call. My recommendation would be to create a separate Escalation policy to match this situation occurring on Weekends, and create an accompanying Routing Rule with a time frame set to the Weekend so that you can send alerts through this Escalation specifically if they come through on the weekends:

Please let us know if you have any follow up questions!