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Uptime Monitor

Escalation ladders

Alert a second and third contact when nobody acknowledges an incident. Set the order and the delay for each step, and stop the ladder with one click.

2 min read

An escalation ladder wakes up the next person when the first one does not react. By the end of this page you will have built a ladder and know how to stop it.

Plan: escalation ladders come with Pro Agency. On other plans the escalation fields do not show.

How a ladder walks

  1. A monitor goes down and the normal down alert goes out.
  2. Each escalation contact has a delay in minutes. Once that delay has passed since the first alert, the contact gets the down alert too.
  3. This only happens while the incident is still open and nobody has acknowledged it.
  4. Steps fire in order, from step 1 up to step 5. Each step fires once per incident.

Escalation contacts get only the down alert. They never get the recovery mail. An email escalation contact does not get the normal alerts either, only its escalation step.

Add an escalation contact

  1. Open the project and click Uptime monitor in the sidebar.
  2. Click the Alerts tab.
  3. Pick a Type and fill in the Destination.
  4. Set Escalation order (optional) to a step from 1 to 5.
  5. Set Alert after (minutes, optional) to a delay from 5 to 720 minutes.
  6. Click Add channel.

Fill in both escalation fields or neither. The channel list then shows a badge such as "escalation step 2 · after 15 min".

Attach the contact to your monitors

This step is easy to miss. An escalation contact only fires for monitors it is ticked on.

  1. Click Edit on the monitor's row.
  2. Tick the contact under Alert channels.
  3. Click Save changes.

Each monitor keeps its own ladder, made of the escalation contacts ticked on it.

Stop the ladder

Acknowledge the incident, and no further steps fire. You can click Acknowledge on the Incidents tab. Or use the link in the down mail, which works without a login. Incidents and acknowledging shows both ways.

Acknowledging does not close the incident. The incident closes by itself once the site recovers.

Example ladder

  • Your own address as a normal Email channel, ticked on the monitor.
  • A colleague as step 1, after 15 minutes.
  • A Slack channel for the on-call team as step 2, after 30 minutes.

If nobody acknowledges, the colleague hears 15 minutes after the first alert. The team channel hears 30 minutes after it.

Alert channels Send uptime alerts to extra email addresses, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord or your own webhook, and attach each channel to the monitors it covers. Incidents and acknowledging Read the Incidents tab, see how long each outage lasted, and acknowledge an ongoing incident from the tab or from the link in the alert mail. Email alerts Who receives uptime mails, what the down, recovery and expiry mails say, and how to send alerts for one monitor to a different address.