Incident response

Escalation policies

Decide who gets paged, in what order, and how long to wait before trying the next person.

An escalation policy is the plan for who to try, in what order. It’s the phone-tree script WarnFire follows when an incident opens.

You’ll find them under On-call → Policies.

How a policy is built

A policy is a numbered list of steps. Each step says three things:

1. Who to page. A step can target a specific person, or a schedule (meaning: whoever is on call there right now). One step can page several targets at once — press + Notify another target to fan out.
2. How long to wait before this step gives up and the next step starts (the Wait field, in seconds).
3. When to stop. Each step continues either while not acknowledged (most common — paging stops once someone takes ownership) or while not resolved (keep escalating until the problem is actually fixed — for alerts so serious that “I’ve seen it” isn’t enough).

A typical starter policy:

How each person is paged

Within a step, WarnFire doesn’t blast every channel at once:

1. First, a push notification to the phone app.
2. If there’s no acknowledgement after about 15 seconds, a text message follows as backup.
3. Then WarnFire waits out the rest of the step’s wait time before escalating to the next step.

(For very short steps, the text backup comes sooner — WarnFire never lets the backup eat the whole step.)

Things WarnFire quietly protects you from

• Editing mid-incident: changing a policy never changes an incident that’s already paging. The plan was snapshotted when the incident opened.
• An unreachable step: if a step’s responder can’t be paged (say, their contact is gone), WarnFire records that on the timeline and moves on to the next step. One broken link never silences the whole tree.
• Breaking a live service: you can’t delete a policy that a service still depends on. Disable the service first, or point it at another policy.

When the tree runs out

If every step finishes and nobody acknowledged, the incident is marked escalation exhausted. It stays open and prominent in the console and app — a signal your policy may need another step or more people.