How Squadcast’s Snooze Incidents Promotes Focussed On Call Shifts
Originally posted on Squadcast.com
Prioritizing Incident Resolution With Snooze Notifications
Dealing with a flood of incidents, each with varying degrees of urgency, can be a daily struggle for Incident Response teams.
Suppose a low-priority alert pings while you're tackling a critical incident. This pulls your focus away from the urgent issue. This constant alert bombardment can:
Distract from critical tasks: Shifting focus between alerts creates context switching overhead and slows down resolution times.
Lead to alert fatigue & alert noise: Constant notifications desensitize teams, making it easier to miss truly critical alerts.
Block prioritization: With everything seemingly urgent, distinguishing genuinely important issues becomes challenging.
How do engineers ensure that high-severity issues take precedence? Don't they want to avoid being bothered or bombarded with notifications while addressing critical matters? They sure do.
The Solution: Snooze Notifications - Your Serenity Now Button
Snooze Notifications allow you to temporarily silence specific alerts for a defined period, giving you space to focus on higher priorities. Think of it as hitting "pause" on an alert without losing track of it entirely.
Here's how it works:
Configuring Snooze Notification is straightforward. With a few clicks, you can select the desired snooze duration. Once an incident is snoozed, it is marked with a bell icon, visible both in the incident overview and the activity timeline. When ready to tackle the incident, a simple click on "un-snooze" opens up options to reassign it or assign it to a different user, squad, or escalation policy.
Configuring Snooze Notifications - Easy Breezy
You can snooze incidents from the Incident List Page and Incident Details Page. To snooze an incident directly from the Incident List Page, follow these steps:
Go to the Incident List page → Hover over the incident you want to snooze → Click on Snooze.
Choose the desired duration from the dropdown options → The incident will now be snoozed for the selected hour(s).
More details here: Snooze Incidents
Use Case & Benefit
The practical use cases for this feature shines in scenarios where engineers receive a mix of high and low-priority incidents. With Squadcast, engineers can snooze low-priority incidents for a designated period (up to 24 hours). This avoids notification bombardment, allowing the team to concentrate on critical issues first.
The SLA clock keeps ticking even during snooze, ensuring incident resolution timelines are met. It's a manual but effective method of reducing alert noise, giving practitioners the discretion to prioritize alerts based on criticality.
Snooze Notifications add flexibility and control to your Incident Response workflow, offering several benefits:
Prioritization: Silence low-priority alerts to focus on critical incidents first.
Maintenance windows: Temporarily suppress alerts during planned maintenance activities.
Reduced alert fatigue: Maintain focus and avoid desensitization to critical alerts, preventing alert blindness.
Improved incident response times (MTTR): Faster prioritization leads to quicker resolutions.
Snooze Incidents provides On-Call teams with temporary relief from low-priority alerts, allowing them to focus on resolving critical incidents without distractions. This manual toggle empowers users to snooze less urgent issues for a specific duration, promoting better focus and streamlined Incident Response.