Effectively managing on-call schedules and ensuring timely incident response are crucial for maintaining system uptime and operational efficiency, especially during Bank Holidays. Many organizations face the challenge of adapting their alert routing strategies to account for these non-business days when regular teams may be off or have reduced availability. While a dedicated “scheduled Routing Rules” feature isn’t currently available in Opsgenie, there’s a robust workaround leveraging Alert Policies and Maintenance Policies to ensure alerts are routed correctly during bank holidays.
This article explores how to utilize Opsgenie’s existing functionalities to intelligently manage alert routing, ensuring that critical alerts reach the appropriate on-call personnel even on bank holidays. This method provides a flexible and reliable solution to maintain seamless incident management coverage throughout the year, including those crucial bank holiday periods.
One common approach to handle holiday scheduling involves using overrides. However, for scenarios requiring a complete shift in alert routing to a different schedule specifically for bank holidays, a more automated and policy-driven approach is beneficial. By combining Alert Policies and Maintenance Policies, you can create a system that dynamically adjusts alert routing based on pre-defined bank holiday dates.
Alert policies in Opsgenie are powerful tools that allow you to modify alerts upon creation. These modifications can include actions like increasing alert priority, adding relevant tags, or, importantly, customizing responders. This responder customization is key to our bank holiday routing strategy, enabling you to add or remove responders such as teams, escalation schedules, or specific individuals based on defined conditions. Alert policies can be configured at both a global level, affecting all alerts, or at a team level, tailoring policies to specific teams and their responsibilities.
Maintenance policies, on the other hand, offer the ability to enable or disable multiple policies simultaneously, and crucially, these actions can be scheduled. This scheduling capability is perfect for automating the activation of our bank holiday alert routing. Like alert policies, maintenance policies can also be configured globally or at the team level, providing flexibility in how you manage policy activation across your organization.
The proposed solution involves creating an Alert Policy designed to override the default responders assigned to an alert during its creation. This policy will be configured to remove any initially designated responders and instead add a specific “Holiday Schedule.” This “Holiday Schedule” would be pre-configured in Opsgenie to include the on-call personnel responsible for incident response during bank holidays. To ensure this Alert Policy is only active on bank holidays, we utilize a Maintenance Policy. The Maintenance Policy is scheduled to coincide with the dates of bank holidays and is configured to enable the Alert Policy exclusively for those days.
Let’s visualize how these policies work together with an example. Imagine an alert is triggered on a bank holiday. Normally, it might be routed to the standard on-call team. However, with our configured policies, the Maintenance Policy, active due to the bank holiday date, enables the Alert Policy. The Alert Policy then intercepts the incoming alert, strips away the default responders, and re-routes it to the designated “Holiday Schedule.” This ensures that the alert is immediately directed to the team or individuals specifically assigned to handle incidents during bank holidays.
By strategically combining Alert Policies and Maintenance Policies, Opsgenie users can effectively manage alert routing during bank holidays without the need for a dedicated “scheduled Routing Rules” feature. This workaround ensures that critical alerts are always addressed by the appropriate personnel, maintaining operational continuity and minimizing potential downtime, even on non-standard business days. This approach offers a flexible and automated way to handle bank holiday scheduling, improving incident response and on-call management within Opsgenie. If you have any questions or require further clarification on implementing this workaround, please do not hesitate to seek assistance.
