Round Robin Functionality

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Overview

Rootly’s round robin feature introduces a streamlined way to manage escalation policies by automatically rotating the paging responsibilities among on-call team members. This ensures that alerts are distributed evenly and efficiently, reducing the burden on any single individual. This feature is included out of the box and is available for use today.

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Key Features

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Paging Methods

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Alert-Based Paging

This is the most common style of round robin paging. Incoming alerts are cycled through the rotation of users. For example, the first incoming alert will page User A. If User A doesn’t respond, it will escalate to level 2. The next incoming alert will page User B to ensure even distribution of alerts.

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Cycle-Based Paging

The cycle-based feature pages responders in the escalation level sequentially within a single alert, up to a configured limit, before escalating to the next level. Paging follows the schedule’s actual on-call rotation order — the same order users appear in on the schedule.

Rotation Scope

When configuring cycle-based paging for an escalation level that targets a schedule, you can choose which users are included:

• Active rotation only — Pages only the members of the currently-active rotation on the schedule. If a schedule has multiple rotations and only one is active right now, only that rotation’s members are paged.
• Entire schedule — Pages all members across every rotation on the schedule, ordered by each rotation’s on-call sequence.

You can set the rotation scope in the paging strategy modal when configuring the escalation level.

Page Up To

Control how many users are paged before escalating to the next level:

• Page up to X users — Set an exact number of users to page before escalating. This counts individual users paged, not full cycles through the rotation. Use the number input to set the limit — the maximum is based on the number of users in the rotation roster.
• Page up to All — Pages every user in scope (based on the rotation scope setting) before escalating. Use this when you want to exhaust the full rotation before moving to the next escalation level.

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Dynamic Updates

Rootly’s web UI dynamically updates to show the current pageable person and the order of escalation. Timeline events also indicate the strategy used for each page.

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Configuring Round Robin

1. Navigate to Escalation Policies:
   • Go to the escalation policies section in your Rootly dashboard.
   • On-Call —> Escalation Policies
2. Create/Select an Escalation Policy:
   • Create a new escalation policy or choose an existing policy you want to configure for round robin.
3. Enable Round Robin:
   • Toggle the round robin option in each escalation policy level.
4. Select either Alert-Based or Cycle-Based Paging:
   • Set the levels to be alert-based, where each new alert pages the next person in line.

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Example Scenario (Alert-based)

This example uses an escalation policy named “SRE - Round Robin EP” with one round robin alert-based level. The first pageable person is Alexandra. When alert A comes in, if Alexandra doesn’t respond within five minutes, the alert moves to Andre, and then to Purvai.

• When alert B comes in, it will then go to Shadab and then escalate to the next level.
• When alert C comes in, it will then go to Andre and then escalate to the next level.

1. Initial Alert:
   • Alexandra receives the first alert.
2. Escalation to Next Person:
   • After five minutes without a response, the alert escalates to Andre.
3. Further Escalation:
   • If Andre also doesn’t respond, the alert moves to Purvai.
4. Repeat Cycle:
   • The repeat feature cycles the alerts back to Alexandra after Purvai.

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Example Scenario (Cycle-Based)

This example uses an escalation policy with two levels. Level 1 uses cycle-based paging targeting a schedule with a rotation of three members in order: Alexandra, Shadab, and Andre. Alexandra is currently on-call. Level 2 is a fallback. With Active rotation only and Page up to All:

1. Initial Alert:
   • Alexandra receives the alert first.
2. Escalation to Next Person:
   • After one minute without a response, the alert escalates to Shadab.
3. Further Escalation:
   • If Shadab also doesn’t respond, the alert moves to Andre.
4. Level Exhausted:
   • All users in the active rotation have been paged. The alert escalates to Level 2.

With Page up to 2 users, only Alexandra and Shadab would be paged before escalating to Level 2.

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Page Next in Rotation

When viewing an active alert that uses cycle-based round robin, responders can manually page the next person in the rotation without escalating to the next level. The Page next in rotation button appears in the alert’s escalation dropdown on both web and mobile. This is useful when the current responder is unavailable or wants to hand off to the next person in the rotation order. The button is hidden once all users in the rotation have been paged. Manual paging can continue through the full roster regardless of the configured “Page up to” limit.

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Timeline Events

Timeline events will now show an indication of the strategy used for each page, providing clarity on how the alert was escalated and which strategy was employed.

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