Escalation quickstart

By the end of this guide you’ll have an escalation policy that:

1. Pages the on-call rotation first; waits 5 minutes for ack.
2. If no ack: pages a secondary user; waits 10 minutes.
3. If still no ack: pages the engineering manager; waits 15 minutes.
4. Repeats once if no one ever acks.

Prerequisites

• An on-call schedule already created — see On-call quickstart.
• The user UUIDs of the secondary engineer and the manager (GET /account/info).

1. Create the policy

Dashboard

1. Escalation → New policy.

2. Name: Primary escalation. Repeat count: 1. Save.

API

curl -X POST https://api.siteqwality.com/escalation_policy \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SITEQWALITY_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "name": "Primary escalation", "repeat_count": 1 }'

Save the returned id.

2. Add the levels

Dashboard

1. On the policy, Add level.

2. Level 1: Timeout 5 min. Targets: the Primary on-call schedule. Save.

3. Add level. Level 2: Timeout 10 min. Targets: the secondary engineer (a user). Save.

4. Add level. Level 3: Timeout 15 min. Targets: the engineering manager (a user). Save.

API

# Level 1 — page the on-call schedule
curl -X POST https://api.siteqwality.com/escalation_policy/$POLICY_ID/level \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SITEQWALITY_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "timeout_minutes": 5,
    "target_schedule_ids": ["'$SCHEDULE_ID'"]
  }'

# Level 2 — page secondary user
curl -X POST https://api.siteqwality.com/escalation_policy/$POLICY_ID/level \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SITEQWALITY_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "timeout_minutes": 10,
    "target_user_ids": ["44444444-aaaa-4bbb-9ccc-bbbbbbbbbbbb"]
  }'

# Level 3 — page eng manager
curl -X POST https://api.siteqwality.com/escalation_policy/$POLICY_ID/level \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SITEQWALITY_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "timeout_minutes": 15,
    "target_user_ids": ["55555555-aaaa-4bbb-9ccc-cccccccccccc"]
  }'

level_number is auto-assigned in creation order.

3. (Optional) Reorder levels

If you ever want to swap level order without recreating, send the desired sequence of level UUIDs:

curl -X PUT https://api.siteqwality.com/escalation_policy/$POLICY_ID/level/reorder \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SITEQWALITY_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "level_ids": ["<level-1-id>", "<level-2-id>", "<level-3-id>"]
  }'

4. Test it

The cleanest test: open a manual incident on a monitor wired to a notification group that triggers this policy, and don’t ack it. You should see the page hit the on-call first, escalate at 5 minutes, then 10, then 15.

Tip

For acceptance testing, use a temporary policy with 1-minute timeouts so you can confirm escalation works end-to-end in 3 minutes instead of 30.

What’s next

Escalation reference Every field on an escalation level.

Notifications overview Channels and groups upstream of escalation.