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Escalatiematrix - meer mensen waarschuwen

5 min leestijd · Meldingen

Goal: Set up an escalation matrix that, after an incident stays open for a certain time, notifies additional people or a different channel.

When to use escalation

Typical scenario: your service goes down at night, the primary on-call does not respond within 15 minutes - the system should automatically alert the shift lead and after another hour the manager too. Escalation makes sure no outage stays unnoticed.

Step 1: Create an escalation policy

  1. Go to Dashboard → Escalation (or URL /dashboard/escalation).
  2. Enter a name (e.g. "Night on-call") and click + New policy.

Step 2: Add steps

A policy is a sequence of steps. Each step has:

  • Delay (min) - after how many minutes from incident start the step fires. 0 = immediately.
  • Channel - Email or Webhook (Slack, Discord, custom endpoint).
  • Recipients - comma-separated e-mail addresses, or a webhook URL.
  • Note - optional, what the recipient should do.

Example 3-tier policy:

  • Step 1: 0 min, email primary on-call
  • Step 2: 15 min, email shift lead
  • Step 3: 60 min, Slack webhook to #ops-emergency

Step 3: Assign the policy to monitors

  • Globally - "Set as default" applies it to all your monitors that don't have their own.
  • Per-monitor - when creating/editing a monitor, pick a specific policy.

Acknowledging an incident (ACK)

Every escalation notification contains an ACK link. Clicking it:

  • Stops further escalation steps.
  • Records who and when acknowledged the incident.
  • Suppresses repeat escalation messages for this incident.

The ACK link does not require login - it is signed with a unique token. When the monitor recovers (UP), escalation also stops automatically.

Webhook payload

For Slack / Discord / custom endpoints we send a JSON POST:

{
  "incident_id": 47,
  "monitor": "API server",
  "started_at": "2026-05-28T14:32:00Z",
  "step_order": 2,
  "ack_url": "https://epulz.io/incident/47/ack?token=..."
}

For Slack just use the incoming webhook URL. For Discord, ?wait=true is not required.

FAQ

What if the incident lasts longer than the last step?

No more escalations are sent. For repeating reminders, add another step with a larger delay (e.g. 240 min).

Does escalation work during quiet hours?

Yes. Escalation uses its own channel (email/webhook) and is not subject to quiet hours, which only affect primary notifications.

Can I test a policy without waiting for a real outage?

Easiest way: create a test monitor with URL https://test-bad-domain.invalid, assign it a policy with a short delay (1 min) and watch the emails come in.