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Notification policies

A notification policy decides who is told about a raised alarm, through which channel, and when. This chapter shows how to view policies in the console and how to give one quiet hours, so it stops paging people overnight and sends what it held when the quiet stretch ends. It is for administrators who look after on-call routing. How quiet hours behave, and how to set them through the API, is in Quiet hours.

Notification policies are under Notification Policies in the sidebar. The entry appears if your role can read notifications. Changing a policy also needs permission to write notifications; without it, a policy opens read-only.

The policy list​

The list shows each policy's token, name, whether it is enabled, how many routing rules it has, and its quiet hours. The Quiet hours column shows the time zone the policy's quiet hours are read in, or a dash when it has none. Click a row to open the policy.

Creating and editing a policy​

Click New notification policy. The form asks for:

  • Token: the identifier of the policy. It cannot change after you create it.
  • Name and Description.
  • Enabled: a disabled policy sends nothing, and drops any notifications it was holding for quiet hours.
  • Throttle (seconds): the minimum time between notifications about the same alarm. Leave it blank for no throttle.
  • Escalate after (seconds) and Max escalations: how long an unacknowledged alarm waits before it is notified again, and how many times. See Throttling and escalation.
  • Quiet hours, described below.

The console does not edit routing rules. A policy you create here starts with none, and a policy you open shows its rules read-only: each severity, the channel it sends through, and its recipients. Saving never changes them. Add or change rules through the API, as described in Configuring notification channels.

When you edit a policy, Save changes sends only the fields you changed. The console also tells the server which version of the policy you were looking at. If someone else saved the policy in the meantime, your save is refused with a message that the policy was modified by another writer; reload the page and make your change again.

Quiet hours​

Tick Hold notifications during quiet hours to give the policy quiet hours. While the policy is inside them it holds its notifications and sends them when the stretch ends, unless the alarm was acknowledged or cleared in the meantime. Untick it and save to remove the quiet hours.

When quiet hours are on, the form shows:

  • Time zone: the zone the slot times are read in. It starts as your browser's zone. The slot times are wall-clock times in this zone, so quiet hours follow daylight saving time with it.
  • Quiet slots: one row per stretch, each a day of the week, a start time and a duration in minutes. Use Add slot for more, up to 56. A slot may run past midnight, and a Sunday slot wraps into Monday.
  • Bypass severity: alarms at or above this severity are sent immediately even during quiet hours. It starts as Critical the first time you turn quiet hours on. Choose None to hold every severity.

Slots may not overlap, and together they may not cover the whole week. The form points out both as you type and keeps Save changes disabled until they are fixed; to silence a policy entirely, disable it instead. The server makes the final check when you save.

If a policy has quiet hours the console cannot read, it says so instead of showing an empty schedule. The quiet hours stay stored and in force, and saving other changes leaves them alone.

Quiet hours are not maintenance windows. A maintenance window belongs to a device type and holds disruptive commands; quiet hours belong to a notification policy and hold its pages.