Using Notification Manager › Notification Manager Concepts › Broadcasting › Escalation

Escalation

Sooner or later, Notification Manager will be unable to notify the contact that you request through any of the specified methods. To help you handle this case, Notification Manager provides the concept of escalation. Escalation allows you to forward notification from one contact to another. Escalation is always active but is only used when all of the other methods that you specified have failed.

The following examples illustrate the escalation functionality.

Example 1:

Joe Smith is a contact who can be contacted by the Voice 1 and the Alphanumeric Pager 1 methods. Joe escalates to Jane Doe. Jane can be contacted by the Alphanumeric Pager 1 method. Jane escalates to Quinton Anderson. Quinton can be contacted by the Voice at Work method. Quinton does not escalate to anyone. The call tree for this example would look as follows:

A notification is issued for Joe Smith (for example, NMFIND NAME(Joe Smith) TELL('JES is down')). Notification Manager attempts to call Joe using Voice 1, but cannot reach him. It next attempts to use Alphanumeric Pager 1 to contact him, but this also fails. Left with no more methods to attempt for Joe, Notification Manager escalates to Joe's escalate person. In this case, the escalate person is Jane Doe. The attempt to contact Jane using Alphanumeric Pager 1 works. At this point the NMFIND is successful and exits without an attempt to contact Quinton Anderson.

Example 2:

Using the same scenario as before, assume Joe Smith cannot be contacted. He escalates to Jane Doe. Jane Doe cannot be contacted using the Alphanumeric Pager 1 method. Because no other methods are defined for Jane, Notification Manager escalates to Quinton Anderson. Notification Manager attempts to contact Quinton using the Voice at Work method. This method fails. Because Quinton has no more methods to attempt, Notification Manager attempts to escalate. However, Quinton did not define a contact to escalate. Escalation has reached the termination point and NMFIND.REX completes without any successful contacts.