Escalation Policy
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
An Escalation Policy defines what happens when the on-call person doesn't respond. Wait 5 minutes, then page the backup. Wait 10 more minutes, then page the team lead. Still nothing? Page the engineering manager. It's like having increasingly aggressive alarm clocks until someone wakes up.
Real Talk
Escalation policies define the chain of notification when alerts aren't acknowledged within specified timeframes. They include multiple levels with different responders, notification channels, and wait times. Implemented in incident management tools to ensure critical alerts are never missed.
When You'll Hear This
"Our escalation policy pages the backup on-call after 5 minutes of no acknowledgment." / "The third escalation level notifies the VP of Engineering — that's the 'building is on fire' level."
Related Terms
Alert Routing
Alert Routing decides which alerts go to which people through which channels. Database down? Page the DBA. API slow? Slack the backend team. Disk full?
On-Call Rotation
On-Call Rotation is a schedule where team members take turns being the person who gets woken up when production breaks.
Opsgenie
Opsgenie is PagerDuty's competitor from Atlassian. It does the same thing — routes alerts, manages on-call schedules, wakes people up.
PagerDuty
PagerDuty is the tool that wakes you up at 3 AM when production is on fire.