Escalation policies

Escalation policies protect your company from missed critical alerts. Escalation policies contain time-boxed steps that automatically page the next responder in the escalation step if the responder in the previous step has not responded. You can create an escalation policy in the GitLab project where you manage on-call schedules.

Add an escalation policy

Prerequisites:

• You must have at least the Maintainer role.
• You must have an on-call schedule.

To create an escalation policy:

1. On the left sidebar, select Search or go to and find your project.
2. Select Monitor > Escalation Policies.
3. Select Add an escalation policy.
4. Enter the policy’s name and description, and escalation rules to follow when a primary responder misses an alert.
5. Select Add escalation policy.

Select the responder of an escalation rule

When configuring an escalation rule, you can designate who to page:

• Email on-call user in schedule: notifies the users who are on-call when the rule is triggered, covering all rotations on the specified on-call schedule.
• Email user: notifies the specified user directly.

When a notification is sent to a user through an on-call schedule or directly, a system note listing the paged users is created on the alert.

The time specified for an escalation rule must be between 0 and 1440 minutes.

Edit an escalation policy

To update an escalation policy:

1. On the left sidebar, select Search or go to and find your project.
2. Select Monitor > Escalation Policies.
3. Select Edit escalation policy ( ).
4. Edit the information.
5. Select Save changes.

Delete an escalation policy

To delete an escalation policy:

1. On the left sidebar, select Search or go to and find your project.
2. Select Monitor > Escalation Policies.
3. Select Delete escalation policy ( ).
4. On the confirmation dialog, select Delete escalation policy.