When an incident is in the Acknowledged state, the team responsible for it is no longer notified. To prevent an acknowledged incident from being forgotten (for example if the responder was interrupted), you can configure reopening policies: an incident that stays Acknowledged beyond a given delay then automatically goes back to the Open state. The on-call member is notified again, and escalations apply again.
Automatic reopening is recorded in the incident history.
Team policies and organization policies
Reopening policies can be defined at two levels:
- at team level, from the main Teams tab, by selecting a team and then the Reopenings menu. These policies apply to the incidents the team is responsible for. They can be edited by Owners and Responders.
- at organization level (global reopening policies), from the main Organization tab, then Reopenings (Incidents section). They are used as a fallback when no team policy applies, as well as for incidents assigned directly to a user or to nobody. Only Owners can edit them.
Team policies therefore take precedence over organization policies. If no policy (team or organization) applies to an incident, it is not re-opened automatically.
Configuration
Each reopening policy includes:
- a name
- conditions (optional): no condition (the policy always applies), at least one of the conditions, or all of the conditions. A condition relates to the priority of the incident or to its tags, in the same way as for routing rules.
- a delay (Reopen after), from 1 minute to 1 week
Policies are evaluated sequentially, from top to bottom: the first policy whose conditions are met is applied. You can change their order by drag and drop.