---
title: "Escalation Step Channels — Lemwatch Help"
description: "How each step in an escalation policy maps to a channel — email, Slack, Discord, generic webhook — based on the Recipient value."
canonical: "https://lemwatch.com/help/escalation-step-channels"
source: "https://lemwatch.com"
---

# Escalation Step Channels

> How each step in an escalation policy maps to a channel — email, Slack, Discord, generic webhook — based on the Recipient value.

## Escalation Step Channels

 Each step in an [escalation policy](https://lemwatch.com/help/escalation-policies) has a **Channel** dropdown and a **Recipient** field. The two together decide who gets pinged.

### Channel: Email

- Recipient: any email address (e.g. oncall@yourcompany.com )

- LemWatch sends a single addressed email via the standard transactional pipeline

- Honours per-site notification email overrides if you leave the field blank

### Channel: Slack

- Recipient: a Slack incoming-webhook URL ( https://hooks.slack.com/services/... )

- We post a Slack-formatted message with the same attachment block used by your default Slack channel

- If you paste a Slack URL into any step regardless of the dropdown, we route it to Slack automatically

### Channel: Discord

- Recipient: a Discord webhook URL ( https://discord.com/api/webhooks/... )

- We post a Discord-formatted message with severity-coloured embeds

- Discord URLs are auto-detected the same way

### Channel: Webhook

- Recipient: any other https:// URL

- We POST the same JSON payload documented in Custom Webhook Integration

- Use this for PagerDuty Events API, Opsgenie, internal incident tooling, Zapier catch hooks, etc.

### Why auto-routing matters

 Before, only email recipients reached the recipient field correctly — Slack/Discord/webhook step URLs were silently dropped. The engine now inspects the URL on every step and routes it to the matching downstream channel.

### Tips

- One policy can mix all four channel types across its steps

- Wait between steps so the previous recipient has a chance to acknowledge

- For high-noise alerts, put a digest-friendly channel (email) first and a louder one (webhook → PagerDuty) later


## Related

- [Help centre](https://lemwatch.com/help)
- [Escalation Policies](https://lemwatch.com/help/escalation-policies)
- [Custom Webhook Integration](https://lemwatch.com/help/webhook-integration)
- [Slack Integration](https://lemwatch.com/help/slack-integration)
- [Discord Integration](https://lemwatch.com/help/discord-integration)
- [Alert Digest Mode](https://lemwatch.com/help/alert-digest-mode)
- [Lemwatch pricing](https://lemwatch.com/pricing)
- [Expected Body Content](https://lemwatch.com/help/expected-body-content)