What is an escalation policy?

Last updated 23 June 2026

An escalation policy is the ordered ladder an alert climbs until someone acknowledges it: page the on-call person, wait, then page them again or page a secondary, then widen to a group or a manager. Each step has a timeout, so a missed alert is backstopped automatically instead of an incident going unanswered. Acknowledging stops the ladder from climbing further.