Sequential escalation levels
Add as many levels as your team needs. Each level has its own targets and timeout window. The policy advances automatically when an acknowledgment isn't received in time.
Escalation Policies
Keep escalating until
Keep escalating until
someone responds.
Define step-by-step policies that notify person A, wait, then notify person B, then the whole team — until someone acknowledges. Per-service policies, multi-channel, with configurable timeouts at every level.
Free tier included
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2-minute setup
payments-svc policy EscalatingLIVE
CURRENT LEVEL2 of 3
TIMEOUT5 min
ACKNOWLEDGEDNo
Level 1 — On-call (notified)100ms
Level 2 — Lead (notifying)80ms
Level 3 — Whole team60ms
Repeat 1×40ms
—8ms
What you get
An alert that doesn't give up.
Critical alerts don't stop after one attempt. An escalation policy works through its levels methodically — notifying each target, waiting for a configurable timeout, then moving on — until the incident is acknowledged or the policy repeats.
Per-level timeout control
Set the acknowledgment window independently for each level — 5 minutes to the on-call engineer, then 10 minutes to the team lead, then immediate page to the whole team.
Target users or schedules
Point any level at a specific person or at an on-call schedule. When a schedule is targeted, the current on-call responder for that schedule is paged — whoever that is at the time.
Automatic re-escalation
Configure a repeat count so the entire policy restarts if all levels exhaust without acknowledgment. Critical alerts keep cycling until someone responds.
Per-service assignment
Each service in your catalog carries its own escalation policy. Payments alerts route to the payments on-call; platform alerts route to the platform team. No manual routing.
Escalation state visibility
See exactly where an active escalation stands — which level fired, who was notified, who acknowledged, and how long each step took — in real time on the incident record.
01 · Nothing falls through the cracks
Step-by-step until
Step-by-step until
someone picks up.
Most alerting tools send a single notification and call it done. Escalation policies are different: they advance through levels automatically, accounting for silence, until the incident is acknowledged — or until the configured repeat limit is reached.
- Advances to the next level after an unacknowledged timeout
- Targets on-call schedules so no name is ever hardcoded
- Repeats the full policy if all levels exhaust unacknowledged
payments-svc policy Level 2 ActiveLIVE
LEVEL 1 TIMEOUT5m — elapsed
LEVEL 2 TIMEOUT10m — running
INCIDENTS THIS WEEK3
L1 — on-call paged100ms
L1 — timeout elapsed85ms
L2 — lead paged70ms
L2 — awaiting ack50ms
L3 — team (pending)20ms
02 · Per-service, defined in your repo
One policy per service,
One policy per service,
provisioned by API.
Assign a different escalation policy to every service in your catalog and provision them all via the REST API. Drop the calls into a script in your repo and pull requests show you exactly which services changed their routing — no surprises during an incident.
- Each service carries its own policy — no shared defaults
- Policies created and versioned via the REST API
- Changes take effect immediately; no restart required
create an escalation policy$ curl -X POST https://api.siteqwality.com/escalation_policy/ \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $SQ_TOKEN" \
-d '{"name":"Payments SLA Policy","repeat":2,"levels":[{"timeout_minutes":5,"target":"schedule:payments-oncall"},{"timeout_minutes":10,"target":"user:payments-lead"},{"timeout_minutes":5,"target":"team:payments"}]}'
-H "Authorization: Bearer $SQ_TOKEN" \
-d '{"name":"Payments SLA Policy","repeat":2,"levels":[{"timeout_minutes":5,"target":"schedule:payments-oncall"},{"timeout_minutes":10,"target":"user:payments-lead"},{"timeout_minutes":5,"target":"team:payments"}]}'
N+1
levels per policy — as many as your team needs
0
alerts dropped — policy repeats until acknowledged
5m
minimum configurable timeout between escalation levels
$0
free tier — escalation policies included from the start
FAQ
Questions, answered.
There is no hard cap on the number of levels. In practice, most teams use two to four levels — on-call engineer, team lead, then the full team — but you can add as many as your operational requirements demand.
If a policy is configured with a repeat count greater than zero, it restarts from level one and works through the levels again. This continues until the repeat limit is reached or someone acknowledges the incident.
Yes — and this is the recommended approach. Point a level at an on-call schedule and Site Qwality determines who is currently on call at the time the level fires. You never need to update the policy when rotations change.
Escalation respects each team member's personal notification rules. If a responder has configured SMS for urgent alerts and Slack for low-urgency ones, that preference is honoured when the escalation policy pages them.
Yes — this is the whole point. Each service in your catalog is assigned its own escalation policy. Payments can have a tight SLA policy; an internal tool can have a relaxed one. Changes are per-service and take effect immediately.
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