Escalation policies
Escalation policies that keep paging until someone responds
An escalation policy tells Oncallz who to page when the on-call engineer does not acknowledge an incident.
Each step waits a set number of minutes, then pages a schedule’s current on-call, everyone in a team role, or a specific person — and the whole ladder can repeat until someone takes the incident.
Three kinds of targets
Page the on-call of a schedule, everyone with a role on the team such as all leads, or one named person. Mix them across steps.
Stops on acknowledge
The moment someone acknowledges — in the web app, the iOS app or by pressing 2 on a call — the remaining steps are cancelled.
Repeat the ladder
If nobody responds after the last step, start the steps over up to ten more times, or stop.
How does escalation work in Oncallz?
When an incident opens, Oncallz first pages whoever is on call in the team’s active schedules. If a policy applies, its first step is scheduled for its delay after the trigger.
When a step comes due and the incident is still unacknowledged, Oncallz pages that step’s targets, records the escalation on the incident timeline and schedules the next step, counting its delay from the step before.
Acknowledging or resolving the incident stops the ladder. Snoozing it pauses escalation for one, four or 24 hours. Due steps are checked every five minutes, so treat step delays as accurate to within a few minutes rather than to the second.
What can an escalation step page?
Each step has a wait time between 0 and 1,440 minutes, one target and, optionally, its own channels. A policy can hold up to 20 steps.
Deactivated users are skipped automatically, so a step that targets someone who has left moves straight on instead of wasting a round.
- On-call of a schedule — whoever is on call right now in the chosen schedule, such as a secondary rotation, with overrides taken into account.
- Team role — everyone holding that role on the incident’s team, for example every lead.
- Specific user — one named person, such as an engineering manager.
- Channels — phone, SMS, push or email for this step only; leave it empty to use the organization’s severity matrix.
Which policy applies to an incident?
A policy can be attached to a team, to an integration, or both. The integration’s policy wins, so alerts from a payments monitor can follow a tighter ladder than the rest of the team’s alerts. A policy either belongs to one team, whose leads can then manage it, or applies organization-wide.
If neither the team nor the integration has an active policy, Oncallz falls back to a basic team escalation window: after the number of minutes set on the team, the team leads are paged.
Can responders escalate manually?
Yes. From an open incident, a responder can page the next on-call person on the team, hand the incident over to another team, assign it to a specific teammate, or snooze escalation while they investigate. During a paging call, pressing 4 escalates to the next person without opening the app at all.
How do I design a good escalation policy?
Start simple and tighten it once you have seen real incidents. A typical first policy looks like this:
- Step 1, after 5 minutes: the on-call of the secondary schedule.
- Step 2, after 10 more minutes: every team lead, by phone call.
- Step 3, after 15 more minutes: the engineering manager as a specific user.
- Repeat once, so a missed round gets a second chance.
- Review MTTA and escalation counts in analytics, and run the AI team scheduling analysis to catch a broken ladder.
Frequently asked questions
How many escalation steps can a policy have?
Up to 20 steps, and the whole sequence can repeat up to ten more times after the last step. Each step waits between 0 and 1,440 minutes (24 hours) after the previous one. Two to four steps are usually enough; a long ladder mostly delays the moment a lead finds out that something is wrong.
Does acknowledging stop the escalation?
Yes. As soon as anyone acknowledges or resolves the incident — in the web app, the iOS app, or by pressing 2 or 6 during a paging call — Oncallz clears the next scheduled step and nobody else is paged.
Snoozing an incident also pauses escalation until the snooze ends, after which the ladder continues.
Can different alerts use different escalation policies?
Yes. Attach a policy to a team for its default behaviour, and attach a different policy to a specific integration to override it. For example, alerts from your payments monitoring can call a lead after five minutes, while the team’s other alerts wait longer or only notify by push.
What happens when the policy runs out?
After the last step, and any repeats you configured, Oncallz stops paging. The incident stays open and visible as triggered on the dashboard, in the iOS app and on the status board.
Responders can still escalate it manually or hand it to another team, and the timeline shows every step that fired and whom it targeted.
Are escalation policies included in the price?
Yes. Oncallz has one plan at $4 per user per month, billed quarterly. Multi-step escalation, schedules, phone and SMS paging, AI investigation and post-mortems are all included; there are no tiers or add-ons. SMS and call charges are paid separately, directly to your own Twilio or Vonage account.
Related
- On-call scheduling Build daily, weekly or custom on-call rotations with automatic handoffs and overrides, so every alert reaches whoever is on call right now.
- Phone & SMS alerting Page on-call engineers by phone call, SMS, push and email by severity — and let them acknowledge or escalate from the phone keypad.
- AI investigation Before it pages, Oncallz summarises the alert and suggests a probable cause and next step; optionally it skips the phone call for clear noise. Your own AI key.
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