Escalation Policies

Escalation policies define how incidents are communicated to your team. They specify who gets notified, through which channels, and in what order.

How Escalation Works

When an incident is created, Pulse follows the assigned escalation policy:

1. The first escalation step is triggered immediately (or after a configured delay)
2. Notifications are sent to the specified recipients via the severity's notification channels
3. If the incident is not acknowledged within the configured time, the next step is triggered
4. Steps can repeat a specified number of times before moving to the next level

Creating an Escalation Policy

1. Navigate to Escalations in the sidebar
2. Click Create Escalation Policy
3. Configure the policy name and steps

Configuring Steps

Each step in an escalation policy defines:

Field	Description
Severity	The severity level that determines notification channels
Initial Delay	Seconds to wait before triggering this step
Repetitions	How many times to repeat this step before escalating
Recipients	Users, teams, and/or on-call schedules to notify

TIP

Start with a lower severity for the first step and escalate to higher severities. This prevents notification fatigue while ensuring critical issues reach the right people.

What Happens When Nobody Acknowledges

After all escalation steps have run, you can configure what Pulse does if nobody acknowledged the incident:

• Don't repeat -- Stop after the last step. No further notifications are sent.
• Repeat N times -- Restart the escalation sequence up to N times (maximum 20). Each full cycle runs all steps again.
• Then escalate to -- After the repetitions are exhausted, hand off to another escalation policy. This lets you chain policies — for example, repeating a team policy twice and then escalating to a management policy.

These settings are configured in the What happens when nobody acknowledges section of the escalation policy form.

The detail page for an existing policy shows a summary of this configuration.

Example Configuration

A typical escalation policy might look like:

Step 1 -- Email notification

• Severity: Low
• Delay: 0 seconds
• Repetitions: 2
• Recipients: On-call team

Step 2 -- SMS notification

• Severity: Medium
• Delay: 300 seconds (5 minutes)
• Repetitions: 1
• Recipients: Team leads

Step 3 -- Phone call

• Severity: High
• Delay: 600 seconds (10 minutes)
• Repetitions: 1
• Recipients: Plant manager