An incident triggered the escalation chain rule, but why didn't it get escalated as expected?

Environment:

Business rules May 2011 and later releases

Issue:

An incident triggered the escalation chain rule which is configured to revalidate. The incident was edited and the status was changed to "Holding". The escalation rule is not based on status. Why didn't the incident get escalated?

Resolution:

When "Revalidate" is enabled in a rule, all rule conditions will be revalidated at the time of escalation to see if they still apply. The revalidate action is not limited to the rule conditions of the escalation rule. Because the escalation rule is in a function, the conditions of the rule which called the function will also be checked.

In the example, since the rule which calls the escalation function has a condition that the status does not equal "Holding", then the revalidation will fail and the incident will not be escalated.

For this reason, it is considered a best practice that each escalation function should be called only by rule(s) in a state. Those rules should not have any IF conditions which might not pass the revalidation check. Ideally, the rule which calls the escalation function should have no IF conditions. Any IF conditions should be within the escalation rule in the function.

For more information on the revalidate option, refer to Answer ID 2015: Using Response Interval, Revalidate, and Recalculate boxes with rules