---
title: "Escalation Policies — Lemwatch Help"
description: "Build multi-step escalation policies so alerts reach the right person, in the right channel, at the right time."
canonical: "https://lemwatch.com/help/escalation-policies"
source: "https://lemwatch.com"
---

# Escalation Policies

> Build multi-step escalation policies so alerts reach the right person, in the right channel, at the right time.

## Escalation Policies

 An **escalation policy** is an ordered list of steps. When an incident fires, LemWatch runs step 1, waits, runs step 2, waits, and keeps going until somebody **acknowledges** the incident or the policy runs out of steps.

### When to use one

- You want different people paged at minute 0, minute 5, and minute 15

- You want email first, Slack second, SMS/webhook last

- You run on-call rotations and need a fallback if the primary doesn't ack

### Build a policy

- Open Settings → Notifications → Escalation Policies

- Click New policy , give it a name (e.g. "Production on-call")

- Click Add step and fill in:

- Step order — the position in the sequence (1, 2, 3 …)

- Wait minutes — how long to wait before this step fires (step 1 is usually 0)

- Channel — email, Slack, Discord, webhook, etc.

- Recipient — an email address, or a webhook URL (see Step channels )

- Save and attach the policy to a site under Edit Site → Notifications → Escalation policy

### Step ordering & uniqueness

 Each step needs a **unique** step_order within the policy. The editor auto-suggests the next number (max existing + 1) so adding a step after deleting one in the middle still works. If you manually enter a number that's already taken, the editor shows **"Step #N already exists in this policy"** instead of a raw database error.

### Acknowledging stops escalation

 The moment any teammate clicks **Acknowledge** on the incident, all remaining steps are skipped. The notification engine now also skips already-acked incidents at query time, so escalation work doesn't pile up. See [Acknowledging incidents](https://lemwatch.com/help/acknowledging-incidents).

### Editing an existing policy

- Reorder steps by editing step_order values

- Change channel or recipient on any step

- Delete a step — the next save renumbers cleanly

- Delete the whole policy — sites that referenced it fall back to their default channels


## Related

- [Help centre](https://lemwatch.com/help)
- [Escalation Step Channels](https://lemwatch.com/help/escalation-step-channels)
- [Acknowledging Incidents](https://lemwatch.com/help/acknowledging-incidents)
- [Setting Up Alerts](https://lemwatch.com/help/alert-setup)
- [Custom Webhook Integration](https://lemwatch.com/help/webhook-integration)
- [Alert Digest Mode](https://lemwatch.com/help/alert-digest-mode)
- [Lemwatch pricing](https://lemwatch.com/pricing)
- [Domain & WHOIS Monitoring](https://lemwatch.com/help/domain-monitoring)