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Escalation is aciona.me’s safety net: if the person paged does not respond, the incident moves to the next one. It is the reason a critical alert does not sit still waiting for someone to wake up.

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How it works

1

The incident is created and notified

The current on-call person receives the notifications and the clock starts.
2

The timeout passes with no response

If nobody acknowledged, took or resolved the incident within the timeout, it is escalated.
3

The next target is paged

The incident moves to escalated, gets a new owner and fires new notifications. The event is recorded on the timeline.
4

The cycle repeats

Each level starts a new timeout — until someone responds or escalation runs out.
Acknowledging the incident stops escalation. That is exactly why ACK exists: it says “I’m looking at this”, and aciona.me stops looking for someone else.

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Who the next target is

The next target comes from the participant order of the team’s schedule: the person immediately after the current owner. When the team has an escalation policy configured, that policy’s levels define the target and the timeout of each step, instead of the plain schedule order.

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Default timeout

Without a policy defining per-level timeouts, aciona.me uses a default of 5 minutes between levels.
Five minutes is a good starting point for critical severity. If your team complains that escalation fires too early, the problem is usually a notification that never reaches the phone — check Push notifications before increasing the timeout.

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When escalation runs out

If there is no next target — the current owner is already the last participant, or the schedule has nobody else — aciona.me:
  1. Records an escalation exhausted event on the incident timeline.
  2. Notifies the organization owners, so the incident is not left orphaned.
Frequent escalation exhaustion is a sign that the schedule is too short. Schedules with a single participant run out at the very first level.

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Manual escalation

Anyone who can act on incidents can also escalate manually, without waiting for the timeout — useful when you already know you need someone else. The action lands on the timeline, recording who escalated and to whom.

Acknowledge and take ownership

Incident lifecycle