Why aren't my rules escalating incidents as soon as they should?
Environment:
Business Escalation Rules
Oracle B2C Service, All versions
Resolution:
Below are a few things to help troubleshoot when incidents are not escalating as soon as they should:
Dbstatus Utility
One consideration when evaluating escalation rules is that escalation rules are only going to escalate incidents when the dbstatus utility runs. Typically, the escalation check for dbstatus runs every 15 minutes, so if you have a rule that escalates a rule more frequently than that, the wait for the utility run can be up to the full interval of 15 minutes until the next scheduled run for dbstatus from the time the escalation time(rule_alerts.alert_time) is set. Therefore, real time escalations are simply not possible. For this reason we suggest that escalation intervals be set to hour or half hour increments greater than 15 minutes with the understanding that up to 15 minutes may be added to the time the escalation level is set.
NOTE: When using Enhanced Business Rule in BUI, instead of using dbstatus, they use SPM Scheduler -s -i utility for escalations. This one is also set to run every 15 minutes by default.
Incident Status
When an incident is in a solved state or a task is completed, they can no longer be escalated. If your incident is solved or your task completed, this is another reason why it will not escalate as expected.
Work Hours
When configuring the escalation rule, you must determine whether the time element should be compared to the response requirements (work hours) configured for the application. That is, if you configure the time element in the escalation rule to be 24 hours, do you want that to be 24 hours (based on a 24-hour day) or 3 eight-hour work days?
When setting up the rule, if you check the Use Response Interval check box, the hours configured in the rule represent hours as configured in your Response Requirements table.
That is, if your response requirements are set up to be eight-hours each day and the rule is configured to escalate incidents in 24 hours, the incident will escalate after 3 days. If the Use Response Interval is not checked, the incident will escalate the next day.
