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 · Accepted solution]

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!

[Thomas Raynal]

Thanks, that should do the trick.

As I cannot see the option, am I correct to assume it is available starting with the "standard" plan, as part of the "Alert and Notification Policies " listed in the pricing page?

[Shivam Naik]

Hi @Thomas Raynal ,

That is unfortunately correct, it is referenced in this article  that Notify Group, Notify next user in schedule, Notify previous user in schedule, Notify random member of team, and Repeat options are not included under the Free and Essentials plans, but you would have access in Standard and above.

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

[Thomas Raynal]

perfect, thanks for the answer.

it might be a bit costly for our use case, we will have to think about it.

[Shivam Naik]

No problem @Thomas Raynal ,

Please let us know if we can answer any follow up questions regarding the use case!

[Daniel Hardaker]

@Thomas Raynal - this didnt work for me , i dont want to change the ack back to unack i just want to refresh the seen state?

[Brennan Kiely]

@Daniel Hardaker We don't have an option to reset just the 'seen' state right now, but we have a feature request to disable this: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/OPSGENIE-36