Glossary
Acknowledgement
Acknowledgement is a responder confirming they have seen an alert and are working on it, which stops the escalation policy from paging anyone else.
Also called Ack.
To acknowledge an alert is to say: I have seen this, and I am dealing with it. In on-call it does one important thing. It stops the escalation policy from moving on to the next person. Without it, the policy cannot tell a page that reached someone from a page that went to a phone on silent.
Incident acknowledgement is not resolution, and mixing the two up is a common and expensive mistake. An acknowledged incident is still going on and still affecting customers. All that has changed is that somebody owns it. A system that treats acknowledgement as closure stops tracking the incident at exactly the moment tracking matters most.
The time between an alert firing and someone acknowledging it is one of the most useful numbers in incident response, because it measures the delivery path rather than the engineering. A slow acknowledgement is rarely a slow engineer. It is usually a wrong phone number, a muted channel, a rotation with a gap in it, or a team that has stopped trusting its alerts. Each of those is cheap to fix once it has a number attached.
| State | What it means | Does escalation continue? |
|---|---|---|
| Open, not acknowledged | The alert has fired and nobody has said they have it yet. | Yes. The policy keeps paging the next person until someone acknowledges. |
| Acknowledged | A responder has it and is working on it. Customers may still be affected. | No. The page reached someone, so nobody else is woken. |
| Resolved | The problem is fixed and the incident is closed. | No. There is nothing left to escalate. |
Questions
What does acknowledge mean in on-call?
It means a responder has seen the page and is taking it. Acknowledging stops the escalation policy, so the next person in the rotation is not woken. It does not mean the problem is fixed.
What is incident acknowledgement?
Incident acknowledgement is the moment a responder takes ownership of an incident. It is usually a state on the incident's timeline, between the incident being opened and being resolved, and it records who took it and when.
How do you acknowledge an alert?
Usually by pressing an Acknowledge button in the alerting tool or in the chat message that announced the alert, or by pressing a key during a phone call. Which of these you have depends on the tool and on the channel the page arrived on.
Is acknowledging an alert the same as resolving it?
No. Acknowledging says someone is working on it. Resolving says the problem is gone. An acknowledged incident is still open, and it should be tracked until it is resolved.
What does a slow time to acknowledge mean?
Usually that the page is not reaching the right person, not that the person is slow. Check the phone numbers and channels on the rotation, look for gaps in the schedule, and ask whether the team has stopped trusting its alerts.
In Uptimely
New Uptimely projects start with three incident states, Identified, Acknowledged and Resolved, and the same three for alerts. Acknowledging an incident from the dashboard, or with the Acknowledge button on the Slack message that announced it, moves it to Acknowledged on its timeline. Once an incident or alert is acknowledged or resolved, its on-call escalation stops. On a phone-call page, pressing 1 acknowledges that page and stops its escalation, but leaves the incident's state unchanged. The on-call email and text message link to the dashboard, where you acknowledge.
Uptimely stops on-call escalation once an incident or alert is acknowledged, and incidents can be acknowledged from the dashboard or straight from Slack.
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Part of the Uptimely monitoring glossary — plain definitions of the vocabulary uptime monitoring, incident response and status pages are discussed in. Something here read wrong to you? Email support@getuptimely.com.