Creating an email only alert level

[Eric Sletten]

We've used OpsGenie for a few infrastructure teams for a couple of years but are now expanding it to development teams.  It's worked well for us to use priorities as a general guideline of how aggressive to be with notifications.  This is the guideline we've followed 

• P1         Page/notification sent to responsible team 24x7/365

• P2         Page/notification sent to responsible team during a subset of hours as determined by team.  (6AM-10PM, 7AM-5PM, etc.)

• P3         email only notification (work email, 24 x 7)

• P4         no notification, alert stays active in console until someone manually closes it

• P5         alert closed in 1 minute unless it continues

For all but the P3 = email only, we can make happen through the use of routing rules, escalation policies, and notification policies.  

The biggest issue with this is that in order for us to get the P3 alert to work correctly, each user needs to have a specific notification rule for P3 alerts that routes them to their company email with no other notification methods enabled (for P3s).  This has worked ok for a smaller subset of users but as we deploy to a much larger user base, I would like to see if there is a way to accomplish the same thing on a larger scale. 

I know we could implement central notification templates but as I understand it, that removes the ability for the user to configure their own notification preferences.  Is their any way to always route notifications for certain alerts (either priority or some other designation) to email only but still allow users the ability to customize their notification preferences?

[connor mcguane]

We recently switched over to Opsgenie from an in-house tool, and we had very similar priority rules.  For the migration, we wrote some custom scripts to give all users a "default" set of notification rules.  In this case, ours is email only for P5, P4, and then anything higher pages.  You will need some calls to the Notification API and the Notification Rule Step API.  We applied this to ~500 users.