OnCall overview
OnCall helps you notify the correct people when issues occur, and ensure that critical issues are addressed in a timely manner.
The OnCall feature is a separate, add-on feature for APEX AIOps Incident Management which lets you create automated notification policies with rotating schedules of users. The customizable triggers in policies let you determine which incident conditions will cause users to receive notifications. Policies can include one or multiple schedules: when a policy is triggered, it can notify a user in one schedule and, if that user fails to take action, then notify a user in another schedule.
Note
Contact APEX AIOps Support for details on adding OnCall to your Incident Management instance.
Requirements
To configure and use OnCall, your instance must have the following:
A list of users
Invite users through User Management to add more users to your instance.
At least one method of ingestion
Correlation configured and working
Incident Management must be able to correlate alerts into incidents to trigger a notification policy
Basic notification flow
OnCall consists of schedules and policies:
Schedule: A list of users who rotate in and out of on-call status defined in the schedule
Notification policy: A trigger and a list of notification actions to take when the trigger is activated
Schedules and notification policies combine to create a flow, notifying users of specific types of incidents, and escalating when needed. While you can configure notification policies in various ways, the following is a simple example of the feature in action:
Incident Management correlation creates an incident meeting the trigger criteria for one or more notification policies.
The user who is currently on call in the notification policy schedule is notified via the selected preference in the user's profile. Users can be notified via SMS, voice (phone), or email (the default).
The on-call user receives the notification, and then logs in to Incident Management before the policy "Wait For" limit defined in the policy is exceeded. The user acknowledges the incident (by clicking a link in email, sending a code in SMS, or responding verbally by voice call). The incident is assigned to the user and the status changes to In Progress.
OR,
The on-call user fails to respond to the notification within the allowed "Wait For" time. A check ensures that the incident still has a status of Open, and if it does, the issue is escalated to a second on-call schedule and notifies the user who is on call in that rotation. Note that the next time the policy is triggered, it will start over again, with the first schedule in the policy.
This process can continue for as many schedules and wait times as are configured in the policy until the incident changes status. A policy can include a maximum of 20 actions.
For detailed instructions on configuring OnCall, see Add a notification policy for OnCall and Add a schedule for OnCall.
Notes
If two schedules are included in a notification policy with no wait time in between, the on-call user in both schedules will get notified when the policy is triggered.
If two notification policies are in use at the same time, a user in each policy will be notified if the incident meets the trigger condition in both.
The OnCall page
Access OnCall by clicking OnCall in the top level of the left-hand navigation.
The page includes two tabs: Schedules and Notification Policies.
Schedules tab
The Schedules tab displays a list of all on-call schedules that are currently available. Configured schedules which are not in use in any policy are indicated. For a schedule to take effect, it must be added to a notification policy.
Click the calendar icon to view the on-call users for the current week or for the next two weeks. Click the three-line menu to view a list of configured schedules instead.
Add a schedule
Click Add OnCall Schedule and then configure the schedule.
Duplicate a schedule
Click the duplicate icon at the top right of the schedule you want to copy.
Edit a schedule
Click a schedule and then click Edit on the page that appears.
Delete a schedule
Click the trashcan icon at the top right of the schedule you want to remove.
Notification Policies tab
The Notification Policies tab lists all policies.
Create a new policy by clicking Add Notification Policy and then configuring the notification policy.