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Acknowledgement

Nobody left holding it.

An email alert can carry an acknowledge button. One click says someone has it, and the escalation stops. If nobody clicks, the flow keeps going and finds the next person.

  • One click, from the alert itself. The recipient does not need to open the dashboard or find the incident. The button is in the email that woke them.
  • Silence is not agreement. An unclaimed alert keeps escalating. The default assumes nobody has seen it rather than assuming somebody has.
  • Visible in the history. Who acknowledged an incident and when is part of the record, alongside its cause and duration.
01 · How it works

Claiming an incident.

An acknowledge link on the email

Enable it on an email notify step and the alert arrives with a button the recipient can click straight from their inbox or phone.

The escalation stops

Once claimed, the policy stops chasing. Repeat alerts and further escalation steps behind an acknowledgement branch no longer fire.

Branch on unacknowledged time

An if / else branch can test whether the incident has gone unacknowledged for N minutes and take a different path if it has.

Keep paging until someone acts

Combine that branch with a repeat alert step and the page fires on an interval until it is claimed or the service recovers.

02 · Why it matters

The failure mode it removes.

Most missed incidents are not missed because nobody was alerted. They are missed because everyone assumed somebody else had it.

No diffusion of responsibility

A channel with five people in it can be read by all five and acted on by none. An acknowledgement makes ownership explicit.

Escalate past a sleeping phone

If the first engineer does not respond, the policy moves to the next one automatically rather than waiting for someone to notice in the morning.

Quieter for everyone else

Once one person has claimed it, the rest of the team stops being paged about something already in hand.

An honest record

The incident history shows how long it took for someone to pick the alert up, which is usually more useful than the outage duration itself.

Questions

Common questions

How does someone acknowledge an alert?
By clicking the acknowledge button in the email. It works from a phone without signing in to the dashboard first, which matters when the alert arrives at three in the morning.
What happens if nobody acknowledges?
The policy keeps going. You can branch on whether an incident has gone unacknowledged for a set number of minutes and use that path to page the next engineer, repeat the alert on an interval, or both.
Does acknowledging an incident resolve it?
No. Acknowledging says a person has taken ownership. The incident stays open until the monitor actually recovers, at which point it resolves on its own and any PagerDuty incident or Jira ticket opened by the policy closes too.
Can I see who acknowledged an incident?
Yes. The acknowledgement is part of the incident record, alongside the cause and duration of the outage.
Keep reading

Related features

Make sure someone actually has it.

Add an acknowledge link to your email step and let unclaimed alerts escalate on their own.