OpsGenie app - repeating notification

[Brett Gilbert]

I'm trying out the OpsGenie platform to receive critical system alarms after-hours by overriding my DND on my Samsung XCover Pro.  It works well with the Insistent Notification option except for one issue which I believe is an Android platform problem, if another notification comes in i.e. email notification from Outlook it will 'stomp' or cancel the sound from OpsGenie.  

I have some apps that deal with this issue by re-asserting their notification after an interval.  As an example, Textra has the ability to keep re-asserting its notification until the text is acknowledged on the notification or the message is read 

It would be nice if the Android App for OpsGenie had a similar feature you could turn on and when it enabled you could tell it reassert itself every x minutes for x number of times.

Is there some method to do this from the Notification Rules page?  Have it resend the notification every x minutes until acknowledged or deleted?

Thanks

[Brett Gilbert · Accepted solution]

So I think I have fixed the issue with the help of support.  I had a forwarding rule that was taking precedence over the Escalation feature.  I'm still unsure of one issue, if I send the Alert to my Team it doesn't automatically escalate.  Only if I send the Alert directly to the Escalation rules does it follow the Escalation rules.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding something but I was under the impression if an Alert is sent to the Team and no one acknowledges or closes the Alert then it would automatically follow the Escalation rules?

[Andrew Laden]

You have it a little wrong.

When you send the alert to the team, it starts going down the routing rules for the team in order till it finds one that matches. Then it follows whatever that routing rule is pointing to. The routing rule can point to a "schedule", an "escalation rule" or "no-one". The last routing rule is the default. If it hasn't matched any routing rules before that one, or there are none, then it uses the last one.

So there is no "default" to notify the whole team. The default behavior is to notify the on call person for the team. This is automatically created when you create the team. A default escalation of "notify the on call" is created, and a default "on call" schedule is created based on the members of the team. The default routing rule is then set to that escalation rule

If you want behavior where it notifies the whole team first, you have to create an escalation rule that does that, and then make that the default. 

If you have built your own escalation rule, you have to make sure it is assigned to a routing rule (or the default one)

Also, a trick to keep in mind. All an escalation rule does is tell opsgenie "who" to notify. Not "how" to notify them. The "how" is all controlled by the users notification rules. Which is why your forwarding was overriding your personal notification rules. Each user can set up how they want to be notified for different events, and they can even change how they are notified based on parameters in the alert.

So its not that your forwarding was overriding the team's escalation. Your forwarding rule was overriding your own notification rules.

[Andrew Laden]

You can list the same notification method multiple times in a notification rule. So that would be one way.

There is also a repeat option at the end of the rule that will repeat the cycle for up to 10 times. 

[Brett Gilbert]

Thanks!

Testing going to test it shortly.

[Brett Gilbert]

So I have tested this twice now and I never get a repeating alert.  I have an Escalation which is assigned to my Team but apparently it's not working like I thought it would because it's not coming in as a repeating Alert so it's not triggering my Alert sound.

According to the Escalation rule it is set as a Notify not an Alert but I don't see the ability to set it as an Alert and there is no sound/notification settings for Notify.

Any ideas?

[Brett Gilbert]

So doing some testing, it appears to be a bug or something in the OpsGenie Android app.  Any repeat of an existing Alert just triggers the default notification sound in my phone, it does not re-issue the Alert sound, alert volume, and insistent (repeat) notification

I've tried it multiple ways and same result every time... big bug/negative for me.

[Andrew Laden]

I have an iPhone, so I can't speak to the android app functionality.

what about sending SMS messages, and adding the opsgenie source phone number to the ones allows to bypass your DND setting. And just repeat the SMS message.

[Brett Gilbert]

I am currently sending SMS messages too as a backup but that notification sound is different and I don't really want to assign my high priority notification to my SMS app because most texts are not high priority 

This really appears to be a bug in the app that it's not recognizing an Escalation as a repeat of the same alert and just treating it as a normal alert.

I was trying to figure out how to send a bug report earlier but I can't figure out how to create a bug report for the app