Escalation Policies

Alert escalation policies are designed to ensure that the issues are addressed promptly with the right level of attention. The main advantage of using an escalation policy is to ensure that critical issues are addressed promptly and that there is a systematic approach to handling incidents. 

When you are using the BizTalk360 escalation policy, an incident will be created for every issue and it will escalate, if no action is taken in a given timeframe. Suppose one of the essential receive or send ports in your BizTalk Server environment goes down. This can disrupt the flow of message transactions, potentially bringing business processes to a halt. In such events,  escalation policy facilitates the smooth message transactions as follows:

• The system automatically generates an incident
• The incident is assigned to the Level 1 operational team or administrator. They are responsible for acknowledging the incident to assess and take immediate action.
• If the Level 1 team does not respond to the incident within the specified timeframe and remains unacknowledged or unresolved state. The monitoring system will automatically be escalated to the next level of users (Integration specialists or BizTalk experts) to resolve the technical issues.
• If further actions are not taken at each level within the specified timeframes, the incident may continue to escalate from level 1 again.

The main purpose is to resolve the incident, and once it is resolved, the incident is marked as closed.

Configure Escalation Policy

To add a new escalation policy, follow these steps:

• Go to "Environment settings" then navigate to Monitoring->Esclation Policy  and click "Add Escalation Policy ", which will open the configuration blade 
• In the configuration blade, provide the policy details including name and description
• Click next to proceed and provide email addresses to be notified in level 1 of escalation. You can also select the email template and Notification channels if needed 
• Click on Add Escalation level to add additional hierarchy levels 
• To set the policy to repeat when no one acknowledges the incident, enable the "If no one acknowledges, repeat this policy " option. By default, this value is set to 0.
• You can also enable the "Auto close incidents when violation becomes healthy" option. This will automatically close the incident when the issue is resolved. Otherwise, the incident will continue to escalate to the next level until it is closed
• Finally, click "Save" to save the new escalation policy

Map the policy to Alarm 

After adding the Escalation policy, you can associate it with an alarm.

• To link the policy with an alarm, go to the alarm configuration page and select the alarm.
• In the selected Alarm configuration, under notification settings select the "Threshold Notification Type" type as Escalation and choose the policy created.

Incident History 

The monitoring system keeps a record of incident histories in the Alert history section under monitoring. These incident histories are presented with details such as the incident ID, its present status, the current escalation level, the nature of issues, and the timestamp when the incident was generated.

 For more in-depth information about an incident, you can click on the eye icon. The details include the incident's escalation history, issue details such as descriptions, the initial issue status, and whether the issue has been resolved or remains open.

From this section, you also have the option to either acknowledge or close the incident. Simply select the incident and update its status accordingly from the top menu.