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Escalating manually

Updated

Manual escalation lets you immediately bring in the next tier of support or a specific person without waiting for the automatic escalation timer to expire. It is useful when you've acknowledged an incident and realize you need additional help, when the issue is more severe than initially assessed, or when you need to loop in someone with a specific skill set.

Technicians use manual escalation during active incidents. The automatic escalation engine handles escalation before acknowledgement; manual escalation is for after you've taken ownership and need to involve others.

Manually Escalating to the Next Policy Step

When you're on an acknowledged incident and need to advance the escalation policy to the next step immediately:

  1. Open the incident.
  2. Click Escalate (or Escalate to Next Step).
  3. OnCall advances current_escalation_step to the next step in the attached escalation policy and fires the pages for that step immediately — without waiting for the step's delay.
  4. The timeline records a manual escalation event with your username and the step that was triggered.

The incident remains in the acknowledged state. Escalating to the next step does not un-acknowledge the incident.

Escalating to a Specific Person

If you need to bring in someone who is not the next step in the policy, you can reassign or add them directly:

  1. Open the incident.
  2. Use Reassign to transfer primary ownership to a specific user. They receive a page and take over as the assigned user.
  3. Alternatively, use a manual Page to send a one-off page to a specific user without changing the assignment. Go to Pages and create a manual page, referencing the incident.

Use reassign when you're handing off entirely. Use a manual page when you need a second person involved while you remain the owner.

Using a War Room for Complex Escalations

For incidents requiring multiple responders:

  1. Open the incident and click Open War Room.
  2. Click Join to add yourself to the participant list.
  3. Other responders who join also appear in the participant list.
  4. Use Post Update to share status visible to all participants.
  5. Click Create Conference Bridge to attach a voice/video bridge (Zoom, Teams, Meet) to the incident.
  6. Click Generate AI Brief to produce a summary for anyone joining late.

War rooms are appropriate for widespread outages, P1/critical incidents, or any situation requiring coordinated response across multiple people.

What Gets Recorded

Every manual escalation action is recorded on the incident timeline:

  • Who triggered the manual escalation
  • What time it happened
  • Which step was advanced to, or which user was paged

This timeline is available in post-incident reviews and reporting.

FAQ

Does manual escalation restart the automatic escalation timer? No. The escalation engine checks current_escalation_step and elapsed time. If you manually advance the step, the engine sees the new step index and continues from there. If the incident is acknowledged, the engine won't advance it further anyway — it only escalates triggered incidents automatically.

Can I escalate backwards (back to a previous step)? Not through the UI. The current_escalation_step only advances forward through the policy steps. If you need to re-page an earlier step's targets, use the manual page feature to send a one-off page to those users.

What if the policy has no remaining steps after the current one? Manual escalation to "next step" will indicate that the escalation policy is exhausted. In that case, use a manual page to reach specific users or bring them into the war room directly.

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