Escalation policies

Route alerts through the right channels in the right order when an incident occurs.

Escalation policies control how Hyperping notifies your team during an outage. Instead of sending every alert to every channel at once, you define a sequence of steps with time delays between them. If the first step does not lead to acknowledgment, the next step triggers automatically.

Escalation policies are useful when:

• You want Slack notifications first, then SMS or phone calls if no one responds
• Different people need to be contacted at different stages of an incident
• You have on-call rotations and want alerts sent to whoever is currently on duty
• You need to reduce alert noise while still making sure critical issues get attention

An escalation policy with multiple steps and notification channels.

Create an escalation policy

1. Go to Escalation Policies in the sidebar.
2. Click New escalation policy.
3. Give the policy a descriptive name (for example, "Production Critical" or "Business Hours").
4. Configure your first escalation step (see below).
5. Click Save at the top-right when you are done.

Configure escalation steps

Each escalation policy consists of one or more steps. A step defines which channels receive alerts and how long Hyperping waits before moving to the next step.

Set the delay

Set the delay in minutes for when the step triggers. A delay of 0 means the step fires instantly when the incident starts. For the second step onward, the delay is counted from the previous step.

Add notification channels

You can add multiple channels to a single step. When the step triggers, all channels in that step receive the alert at the same time. Available channels include email, SMS, phone call, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and any other configured integrations.

For email, SMS, or phone call notifications, you can select individual recipients or use the "Everyone" option to notify all teammates in the project.

Add more steps

Click + Add another escalation step at the bottom of the policy. Each additional step acts as a fallback if the incident is not yet resolved after the previous step's delay.

Use on-call schedules

For email, SMS, or phone call notifications, you can select an on-call schedule instead of a specific recipient. This sends alerts only to the team member who is actively on-call at the time of the incident.

On-call schedules appear in the recipient dropdown under the On-Call Schedules section when configuring these notification types. For more details, see On-call documentation.

Assign a policy to a monitor

1. Open a monitor's detail page.
2. Go to the Notifications tab.
3. Select an escalation policy from the Escalation Policy dropdown.

Without an escalation policy, a monitor sends alerts to all configured channels simultaneously. Assigning a policy overrides this behavior and follows the step-by-step sequence instead.

Example setup

Step 1 (0 min): Send a Slack message to the #incidents channel.

Step 2 (5 min): Send an SMS to the on-call engineer.

Step 3 (15 min): Call the engineering lead and send an email to the team.

This setup gives the team five minutes to respond in Slack before the alert escalates to SMS, and another ten minutes before triggering phone calls.

Troubleshooting

Alerts are skipping escalation steps.
Check that the delay between steps is long enough. If the incident is resolved before the next step triggers, remaining steps are cancelled.

A teammate is not receiving alerts.
Verify they are added as a recipient in the correct escalation step, or that they are part of the assigned on-call schedule. Also check that their notification channel (email, phone number) is configured in their account settings.

All channels still fire at once.
Make sure the escalation policy is assigned to the monitor. Go to the monitor's Notifications tab and confirm a policy is selected.