warning when attempting to ack an incident that is already acknowledged

I have a team in my org that uses a single level escalation policy to alert all of their responders. They do this because they are responding to critical alerts that have been escalated by upper level executives and they feel that response time is the most important metric for their team. Unfortunately because of this focus on response time, they have responders duplicating work by acknowledging and working incidents that have already been assigned.

This team is requesting that incidents only allow a single responder for their incidents. I don’t know that that makes sense, but I think a warning pop up when attempting to acknowledge an incident that has already been acknowledged could work. Maybe make one of these an optional setting at the service level?

Hi Travis!

That’s an interesting use case. Normally we’d definitely recommend a single responder be notified for an incident, and for teams with a high volume of critical alerts to take a look at using round robin and shortened escalation times.

With multiple folks speeding to respond to the same incident, even having a popup is just going to push the race condition down a step. If responders are using the web UI, they could try hitting refresh once before claiming an incident. If they’re interacting with PagerDuty from multiple channels, though, like via Slack, that might not work for them.