How Do I Send My Team/Manager Alerts For Extended Outages?

Here we’ll outline a workflow for a common use case in the Uptime.com platform: ensuring that alerts due to outages are delivered through the correct channels, and that the issue is escalated to colleagues in your organization as necessary. We’ll walk through setting up contacts, using tags to clearly categorize monitoring checks, configuring an escalation policy with the right personnel and timing, and efficiently applying the escalation policy. Following this process helps ensure critical outages are escalated promptly and consistently, so both initial responders and management-level stakeholders are aware of outages while reducing unnecessary alerts.

Setting Up Contacts

The first step in configuring your alerting workflow is setting up Contacts to notify team members of downtime. Access the Contacts screen by clicking Notification > Contacts, then click New Contact in the upper right corner to add a new contact and select the alerting method:

Here are some best practices to consider when setting up your contacts to make sure downtime is communicated to management:

• Any team member who will be receiving alerts needs to have a contact created.
• It can be helpful to create multiple contact records for the same team member. For example, you may want to have a team member contacted only through email for initial alerts, but then receive SMS and phone alerts once the outage has lasted for an extended period of time. In this use case, create a contact for the initial email alert, then an additional contact record only for SMS and phone alerts. This way, the separate contacts allow for increased granularity in your escalation policy. Give these contacts identifying names to distinguish them easily; for example “User 1 Email” and “User 1 Phone/SMS.”
• Remember you can add an unlimited number of contacts to your account.
• When adding a contact, use the On-Call Hours feature to ensure that contacts are only receiving notifications during their working hours. For example, you would likely want to set the on-call hours for management to be inside normal working hours so that they do not mistakenly receive unnecessary alerts in the middle of the night. Use the On-Call Hours tab when creating the contact to configure this:

Setting Up Tags

Tags can help organize checks and streamline workflows, allowing you to easily filter down to specific teams, environments, or sites. This helps both in searching and applying bulk updates to checks, such as adding contacts, setting maintenance, or applying escalation policies. To manage your tags, click Settings > Tags.

Once tags are assigned, you can use them to filter checks in your Monitoring page to efficiently control alerting, ensuring the right people are notified when a check goes down. You can use tags to quickly apply actions to checks, such as scheduling maintenance or assigning an escalation policy. You can organize checks by tagging them based on the product they monitor or the team responsible for responding to outages.

Setting Up the Escalation Policy

Escalation policies allow you to determine when and how frequently an outage should be communicated to senior members of the team. You can set escalation policies under the Escalations tab when editing a check, or by selecting the check(s) under the Monitoring page and clicking More Actions > Set Escalations:

Creating tags in the previous step allows you to filter your checks by team, product, environment, or website, allowing you to quickly set the policy based on the necessary criteria.

Once you’ve selected the appropriate checks, add your contacts as necessary and define how long the check should be down before the policy is enacted, as well as the number of times the alert will be repeated. This is where you can customize and fine-tune your alerting based on your team needs, and where having individual contacts for separate alerting methods is helpful:

For some additional tips on creating an Escalation Policy that works for your team without causing unnecessary alerts, see our guide on Creating Responsive Escalations for Downtime Alerting.