Alert group of users and all must ack

Question

We are looking to setup an OpsGenie flow for a major incident, it would have 5 people in it.

OpsGenie must ensure all 5 are contacted at the same time and constantly until all 5 have been reached and ack'd individually rather than first that ack'd stops the chasing of the other 4 that have not ack'd yet, this is because the incident requires all 5 people to be present to work on the issue together.

Is this possible in OpsGenie and could someone help point me to a guide / help on this type of situation? I've found some bits suggesting it needs escalations to make this work but got a bit confused so thought I'd reach out to community see if anyone can help easier?

Thanks!

Shashwat Khare · Answer

Hello @John Smith ,

Yes, as you rightly mentioned, if all 5 members are from the same team, it will end up notifying all team members for the open alert, however, it would not wait for all 5 users to acknowledge the alert, instead it will be ack'ed by 1 and would stop notifying the rest 4 users.

In this case, you can make use of the team based notification policy to restart/delay/suppress notifications based on an alert filter as in the below example screenshot:

Please refer to the below document link on how notification policies work in Opsgenie:
https://support.atlassian.com/opsgenie/docs/create-and-manage-team-alert-policies/

Best,
Shashwat

Tom Russell · Answer

I may be wrong, but I believe that they will all get the initial notification, but as soon as one of the team has acknowledged the alert, further notifications will stop for all members. If that's acceptable, the above solution would work.

Another option, if you have the subscription that includes the OEC, is to have a script that closes the initial inbound alert, but opens five new alerts, one for each team that needs to respond. You could include a link to the trigger alert in the description, or as a details field. With separate alerts, each alert will keep escalating until that team member responds.

John Smith_gwdswi · Answer

Hi @Shashwat Khare

Thanks for your information, not 100% sure it can do what we need from the info provided and some more searching on these forums but could maybe be a way to sort of bodge it in with a workflow I envisage could be:

Alert comes in to OpsGenie > Route Alerts to Escalation Policy X

This has config:

If alert is not CLOSED after 0 minutes

Notify all members of Team - Team X  (Team X is the 5 people that must be gathered as a group of 5 to fix the issue)

This will then contact all 5 of them, the will get calls / texts etc as per there profile settings and be asked to Ack?

Set this to repeat every 1 minute for 20 times

This will re-contact them all every 1 minute because the Alert is not Closed? or will that just contact the non-ack'd as I see the option to reset status of Ack / Seen back to nothing?

We then instruct the team of people, once they have all gathered in the meeting (which for this situation is held in a 3rd party platform outside of Atlassian tools) the first step must always be they must close the alert in OpsGenie to stop it chasing any further as they are all present?

Does that sounds like it would work to give me the solution of contacting continuously 5 people until all 5 are together?

The important bit is all 5 people must all come together as a full group of 5, this is where the challenge seems to be as product seems to be more focused on only ever wanting 1 person to deal with an issue and then maybe alert some more if they haven' done something / time has gone on, but for this situation I need 5 specific people to come together straight away as if only 2 turn up it won't be possible to fix so have to keep chasing the 5.