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Acknowledging alerts

Updated

Acknowledging an alert tells OnCall that a specific person is actively working on it. It stops the escalation engine from advancing to the next step. Until someone acknowledges, OnCall keeps escalating through the policy — paging the next person or team after each step's delay expires.

Technicians acknowledge alerts when they receive a page and take ownership of the incident.

What Happens Before Acknowledgement

When an alert fires, OnCall creates an incident in the triggered state and immediately pages the first escalation step. Every 2 minutes, the escalation engine checks open triggered incidents. If the delay for the next step has elapsed and nobody has acknowledged, it pages the next step. This continues until the incident is acknowledged or the policy is exhausted.

Acknowledging via Push Notification

  1. Receive the push notification on your phone.
  2. Tap the notification to open the incident in the OnCall mobile app.
  3. Tap Acknowledge. Your name is recorded as the acknowledging user and the timestamp is logged on the incident timeline.
  4. The incident moves to the acknowledged state and escalations stop.

Acknowledging via the Web App

  1. Open OnCall in your browser. Active triggered incidents appear at the top of the Dashboard.
  2. Click the incident to open it.
  3. Click Acknowledge. The incident status changes to acknowledged.

You can also acknowledge directly from the incident list without opening the detail view.

Taking Ownership

Acknowledging an incident assigns you as the owner (assigned_to). If you need to hand the incident to someone else:

  1. Open the incident.
  2. Use the Reassign option to transfer ownership to another user.

Reassigning does not un-acknowledge the incident. Escalation stays stopped. The new owner sees the incident in their active queue.

What to Do After Acknowledging

Once you've acknowledged, the escalation clock is paused. Work the incident:

  • Add notes to record what you're seeing and what you've tried.
  • Attach a conference bridge if you need to pull in other people (see ./resolving-incidents.md).
  • Launch a playbook if a runbook exists for this type of issue.

If you resolve the issue, close it out. See ./resolving-incidents.md for steps.

Auto-Resolve After Acknowledgement

If an acknowledged incident is not resolved within the service's auto-resolve window (default 4 hours), OnCall will automatically resolve it with resolved_by: system. This prevents stale acknowledged incidents from piling up. If you're working a long-running issue, touch the incident (add a note, update severity) to reset the auto-resolve clock.

FAQ

What if I acknowledged the wrong incident? You can re-trigger it (if needed) or reassign it to the correct person. There is no "un-acknowledge" button, but you can add a note explaining the situation and reassign. If the incident needs to be escalated back up, use the manual escalation option (see ./escalating-manually.md).

Will I still be paged on future steps after acknowledging? No. Acknowledgement stops all further escalation for that incident. No additional pages will fire.

What if I get a phone call and I can't access the app immediately? Acknowledge as soon as you can get to a browser or the app. The escalation engine runs every 2 minutes, so there is a short window before the next step fires. If the next step has already fired before you acknowledge, that's expected — acknowledging will still stop any further escalation.

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