Associating escalation policy with team auto-adds all people to the team

#1

Hi,

we’re trying out teams, created a team and added people to it. We also associated an escalation policy with the team (to be able to list services and the corresponding team who is owning that service).

Let’s say we have a DevOps team:

  • Alice
  • Bob

The escalation policy is as follows:

  1. Notify either Alice or Bob, depending on their shifts
  2. Escalate to the DevOps team.
  3. Escalate to the CTO, Carl.

When we associate that escalation policy to a service, Carl gets auto-added to the DevOps team. This is unexpected because we don’t want to add Carl to the team. If we did that, Carl would be on all teams because ultimately, he is the last step in each escalation policy. This applies not only to Carl but to anyone who is part of multiple escalation policies.

As this behavior is well-documented, it seems to be intentional. We only noticed this thanks to Terraform – associating the team with an escalation policy created an unexpected diff on Carl.

What’s the thinking behind this? Any suggestions to avoid adding Carl to 20 teams?

Thanks,
André

#2

Hi Andr!

As escalations tend to be assigned to those who can address the issue, the escalation object assumes that all users in the escalation policy belong to the team.

I understand that this might not work for your use-case. If you could elaborate on the kinds of reasons for why you would want to escalate an incident to a user not on the team, this would be great to share in our feature improvement suggestion for our Product team.

#3

Hi geeth!

To reiterate, we have escalation policies in place that mimic reporting lines: One engineer -> several engineers -> engineering manager -> area lead -> CTO.

We believe that a hierarchical organization of escalations, going up to the CTO, is fairly common. But from our perspective, that doesn’t make the CTO (or the lead between engineering managers and CTO) part of 20+ teams.

This has a very real maintenance impact for us: Whenever we create a team, we need to remember to add leadership people to it.

Does this make it clearer?

#4

Hi Andr!

Thanks for sharing that feedback and I will share that with our Product team.

In terms of adding leadership people to the team, I wanted to shared that users should be automatically added to the teams when the escalation policy they are on-call for is associated to a team.
In this way, it should not require additional steps to add the leadership people to a team as it would be done when they are added to the escalation policy or when the escalation policy is associated to a team.

#5

hi geeth!

you wrote:

In this way, it should not require additional steps to add the leadership people to a team as it would be done when they are added to the escalation policy or when the escalation policy is associated to a team.

Unfortunately, this is false when using Terraform (which we do). When you use Terraform, you declare users and escalation policies as 2 separate resources. When you add a person to an escalation policy resource, and you forget to duplicate the information on the user resource, Terraform will detect that the user is in more teams than currently defined. In an attempt to sync the user resource with reality, it will then try to remove the person from that team.

In order to avoid that, we always have to add people to the team. This is what I was referring to when I mentioned the maintenance impact.

Thanks again for forwarding this to the team. Have a great day!

Best,
André