Sometimes there are situations in which you need to notify your on-call responders without a corresponding alert - imagine the case where you've discovered a critical issue and it hasn't triggered your alerts but you want to make sure the team are notified. In these cases, you can trigger a manual escalation which behaves just like an escalation triggered by an alert.
Triggering a manual escalation is done via either the incident Slack channel or the incident dashboard. The first step involves creating an incident if you haven't done so already (see our article here for more information about incidents) and navigating to the incident Slack channel or incident dashboard.
From there you can manually escalate the incident to any of your configured escalators. This will start the notification process and associate the escalation with the relevant incident.
ℹ️ To make the most of on-call, we'd recommend that you aim to configure your alert sources and routing to escalate automatically in as many situations as possible.
If we don't have an integration for a tool that you use, you can try using our HTTP webhooks and if that doesn't work for your use case, get in touch via your Slack Connect channel, on Intercom, or at [email protected] and we'll see what we can do.
How to customise escalating in Slack
When someone uses /inc escalate, or clicks on an Escalate to someone quick action in Slack, what they're presented with depends on what escalators you have installed.
If you have multiple escalators installed (e.g. you've connected PagerDuty and you're using incident.io On-call) then by default someone will be asked which escalator to use when they're escalating.
However, you can customise this in a number of ways...
Customise which escalator to use
If you'd like to always go to a particular incident.io, PagerDuty, Opsgenie or Splunk On-call escalation form, you can do this by going to the incident.io dashboard, then choosing Settings -> Forms -> Escalate and choosing one of those.
You can even customise this based on the incident type by going to the Settings -> Forms and clicking the + Add incident type button to customise the escalate form for a particular incident type.
Escalating using a Catalog type
By default, you can escalate by letting users choose from a person or an escalation path that they'd like to page. However, if you're a person escalating, you might not always know who to escalate to, or which escalation path to use.
For example, you might work in customer support and you spot an issue with Login. You might not know which team is responsible for Login, so you don't know who to escalate to.
You can customise the Escalate form so that you can search for any Catalog type, and so long as you tell us how that Catalog type relates to an Escalation Path, we'll escalate to the appropriate people. For example:
You could let people search for
Features. Then yourFeaturestype has a relatedTeam, which has anEscalation path, so we'll automatically escalate to the team that own that feature.You could let people search for
Services, which have an associatedTeam, which has anEscalation path, so we'll automatically escalate to the team responsible for that service.
To set this up, go to Settings -> Forms -> Escalate and scroll down to Add another field. Here you can choose which Catalog type you'd like to let people search for.
Once you've chosen a Catalog type, you'll need to tell us how to map from this type to a related escalation path.
What if I'm in the middle of migrating to incident.io?
If you're in the middle of migrating, or you're testing out incident.io on-call, you can default to escalating via incident.io, but still escalate to other providers for certain teams.
To get started with this, you need to set up a Catalog type that people can search for. This is most often a Team type.
You'll then want to give your Team type some attributes such as:
Escalation path - so you can tell us how to escalate using incident.io
PagerDuty service - if you're using PagerDuty, so you can tell us which teams should still be contacted using PagerDuty
Opsgenie team - if you're using Opsgenie, so you can tell us which teams should still be contacted using Opsgenie
Once you've set up your Catalog type, update each of its entries to have appropriate values for each of those attributes.
For example, in the screenshot below the On-call team can be escalated to using incident.io via the ONC escalation path. And the Infrastructure team can be escalated to using PagerDuty for the Database service.
Once you've set up the Catalog type, you need to plug that into your escalation form. Go to Settings -> Forms -> Escalate and choose Add another field. Pick your Catalog type and then tell us how to map from that Catalog type to an escalation path.
Then press Escalate to another service and tell us to map from that type to either a PagerDuty Service or an Opsgenie Team.
Once that's done, choose incident.io as the place to 'send manual escalations to', as otherwise we'll still ask users which escalator to use each time they escalate. When incident.io is selected, if you've defined other escalators using Catalog, we'll still escalate using those other escalators, not just incident.io.
