Responders Behavior with Escalation Policy

Question

We’ve recently switched our incident response process to using responders when needing to pull in additional resources. In this case we are using an escalation policy with multiple users on step 1, but only one of the users is getting notifications in this case.

It is still adding everyone as a responder, just seems to be randomly choosing one of them to notify. I’ve verified the following:

There are multiple people in the first step of the escalation policy
The escalation policy does not have the “round robin” enabled
each person in the escalation policy has valid high urgency settings and no pending validation steps in contact info
each person is showing up as a responder in the incident when using the escalation policy

Is this intended behavior?

danieljcafonso · Answer

Hello ​@James_Flanery👋 Hope you are doing well!This might be due to your on schedule configuration.When you add an escalation policy as responders, PagerDuty sends responder invites to everyone who is currently on call at that level (and then continues down the policy levels) until someone accepts or the incident resolves. It’s not “round robin” for responder requests, and it shouldn’t pick a single person at random.Here are some ways to ensure everyone gets notified:Put each person as an explicit user in the first rule of the escalation policy.Create individual schedules (one per person/time window) and place them all in the same rule so all on callat that moment are notifiedIf you’re using Incident Workflows, include multiple usersin the responder request there.If the first rule must use a schedule, but you want multiple people notified, that schedule must actually have multiple people on call at the same time (e.g., overlapping layers). Otherwise you’ll still only get the single current on‑call.Let me know if this helped!Have a great day😁

Join PagerDuty Commons

Login to PagerDuty Commons

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded