Overview

In practical terms it means that:

• Users can be informed about new problems immediately

• Notifications can be repeated until the problem is resolved

• Sending a notification can be delayed

• Notifications can be escalated to another “higher” user group

• Remote commands can be executed immediately or when a problem is not resolved for a lengthy period

Actions are escalated based on the escalation step. Each step has a duration in time.

You can define both the default duration and a custom duration of an individual step. The minimum duration of one escalation step is 60 seconds.

You can start actions, such as sending notifications or executing commands, from any step. Step one is for immediate actions. If you want to delay an action, you can assign it to a later step. For each step, several actions can be defined.

The number of escalation steps is not limited.

Escalations are defined when configuring an operation. Escalations are supported for problem operations only, not recovery.

Miscellaneous aspects of escalation behavior

Let’s consider what happens in different circumstances if an action contains several escalation steps.

Escalation examples

Example 1

Sending a repeated notification once every 30 minutes (5 times in total) to a ‘MySQL Administrators’ group. To configure:

• Set the escalation steps to be From ‘1’ To ‘5’

• Select the ‘MySQL Administrators’ group as recipients of the message

Notifications will be sent at 0:00, 0:30, 1:00, 1:30, 2:00 hours after the problem starts (unless, of course, the problem is resolved sooner).

If the problem is resolved and a recovery message is configured, it will be sent to those who received at least one problem message within this escalation scenario.

If the trigger that generated an active escalation is disabled, Zabbix sends an informative message about it to all those that have already received notifications.

Example 2

Sending a delayed notification about a long-standing problem. To configure:

• In Operations tab, set the Default operation step duration to ‘10h’ (10 hours)

• Set the escalation steps to be From ‘2’ To ‘2’

A notification will only be sent at Step 2 of the escalation scenario, or 10 hours after the problem starts.

You can customize the message text to something like ‘The problem is more than 10 hours old’.

Example 3

Escalating the problem to the Boss.

Details of Operation 2:

Note the use of {ESC.HISTORY} macro in the customized message. The macro will contain information about all previously executed steps on this escalation, such as notifications sent and commands executed.

Example 4

A more complex scenario. After multiple messages to MySQL administrators and escalation to the manager, Zabbix will try to restart the MySQL database. It will happen if the problem exists for 2:30 hours and it hasn’t been acknowledged.

If the problem still exists, after another 30 minutes Zabbix will send a message to all guest users.

If this does not help, after another hour Zabbix will reboot server with the MySQL database (second remote command) using IPMI commands.

Example 5

An escalation with several operations assigned to one step and custom intervals used. The default operation step duration is 30 minutes.

Notifications will be sent as follows:

• to MySQL administrators at 0:00, 0:30, 1:00, 1:30 after the problem starts

• to Database manager at 2:00 and 2:10 (and not at 3:00; seeing that steps 5 and 6 overlap with the next operation, the shorter custom step duration of 10 minutes in the next operation overrides the longer step duration of 1 hour tried to set here)

• to guest users at 4:00 hours after the problem start (the default step duration of 30 minutes returning between steps 8 and 11)