🐦‍⬛ Round Robin Escalation Policies

With a Round Robin escalation policy, users can be assigned alerts sequentially instead of a single responder receiving all alerts for the policy during their on-call shift. This is a great way to reduce pager fatigue by ensuring alerts are equally distributed across team members. It also ensures that an individual won’t be double-paged to manage multiple incidents at once in short succession, leading to improved response times. Let’s take a look at how it works!

When creating an escalation policy, you’ll see the option to toggle on “Assign via Round Robin”.

When you toggle on Round Robin, you’ll see the option to rotate between Alert-based and Cycle-based. Alert-based is the default and most commonly used option. It means that everyone in this Escalation Policy level will take turns to get paged for each incoming alert. So in this case, Ashley will receive an alert, then Andre will receive the next alert, then Dan, then Jamie, and so on. If any of the users miss or escalate an alert, it will move to the next level of the escalation policy. So if Ashley misses or escalates the page, it will go straight to the next level—in this case, pinging the #customer-rapid-response Slack channel and paging JJ.

Cycle-based Round Robin is a different configuration that is typically difficult (if not impossible) to set up in other paging tools, yet remarkably simple to do in Rootly! In a Cycle-based Round Robin, a single incoming alert will page each user in the first level before moving to the next level of the policy. So if Ashley misses or escalates an alert, that alert will go to Andre, then Dan, then Jamie, before moving to the next level of the policy. In Cycle-based Round Robin policies, you can also specify how many times the alert will rotate through the first level before moving to the next.

To start implementing Round Robin policies, create a new Escalation Policy or edit an existing one from Rootly web by navigating to On-Call > Escalation Policies from the left-hand navigation menu.

🌝 New & Improved

🆕 Introduced new getScheduleShifts API endpoint to fetch the current on-call user for a specific on-call schedule.

🆕 Updates to action items are now automatically logged in the incident timeline. Clicking an action item from the timeline will navigate you to either the Tasks or Follow-Ups tab.

💅 Option to allow a status page to be discoverable by public search engines will now only appear if the status page is set to public. You will no longer see this option if your status page is set to private.

💅 “New Status Page Event” modal will now auto-select the previously published status. This will make it easier for publishers to see what was previously posted to the status page. Now, both the status page and status from the previous publication will be auto-filled.

🐛 Fixed intermittent issue with some teams unable to assign users to incident roles through Slack.

🐛 Fixed issue with Slack Smart Defaults announcing all new incidents in high severity channels, regardless of the actual incident severity. 

🐛 Fixed incorrect filter results when filtering by custom fields on the Retrospectives and Action Items pages.