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By default, anyone in your organization can resolve any alert and acknowledge, snooze, or cancel any escalation. For most teams that’s the right thing: anyone can jump in and help out. As you grow, you might want tighter control to avoid someone accidentally taking actions on alerts or escalations outside their remit. In incident.io, you can restrict acting on alerts and escalations to only the team responsible for them, so that someone in an unrelated team can’t accidentally resolve a page or silence an escalation they don’t understand. This guide walks through setting that up. There’s one important exception: anyone who’s actually paged by an escalation can always acknowledge or snooze it, so you can never be paged by something you’re not allowed to silence.

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Before you start

You’ll need:
  • Teams set up in the catalog, with the right people as members. See Getting started with teams.
  • Alerts tagged with their owning team. Team-based permissions use the Team attribute on an alert to decide which team owns it, so your alert sources need to extract a Team attribute. This is the same attribute used for routing (see Alerts and teams if you haven’t set this up yet).
If an alert has no Team attribute, it has no owning team, and once you’ve set up the permissions below, only people with the permission granted globally (such as admins) will be able to act on it. Make sure the alerts you care about are tagged with a team before you start.
The permission you’ll be working with is Take actions on alerts and escalations. It covers resolving alerts and acknowledging, snoozing, or cancelling escalations. It’s granted to everyone through the Standard role by default, and the goal is to move it so it’s only granted to each team for the alerts and escalations they own.

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Step 1: Create a team role with the permission

Go to Settings → Permissions, and on the Team-level tab create a team role (or edit an existing one), selecting Take actions on alerts and escalations.
Creating a team role with the 'Take actions on alerts and escalations' permission selected, showing a warning that all users still have the permission via the Standard role
Assign this role to the members of each team who should be able to act on that team’s alerts and escalations. You can control who has which role from the Members tab of the team’s page. See Team roles for more on how this works.

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Step 2: Remove the permission from the Standard role

Now that the right teams have the permission, remove it from Standard so it’s no longer granted to everyone. Until you do, everyone keeps it globally and the restriction has no effect. Go to Settings → Permissions, and on the Account-level tab, edit the Standard role. Uncheck Take actions on alerts and escalations, and save.
Editing the Standard role with the 'Take actions on alerts and escalations' permission highlighted

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Step 3: Check it’s working

Once it’s set up, someone who isn’t on the owning team will see the resolve and acknowledge buttons disabled, with a tooltip explaining why and who they can ask instead.
A disabled resolve button with a tooltip explaining the user isn't on the owning team
Members of the owning team and anyone paged by an escalation will be able to act as normal.

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FAQs

They have no owning team, so once the permissions are restricted, only people who hold the permission globally (such as admins) can act on them. If you want a team to manage these alerts, make sure the alert source extracts a Team attribute. See Alerts and teams.
Yes. Anyone notified by an escalation can always acknowledge or snooze it, regardless of team membership. This makes sure a misrouted page can never reach someone who then can’t silence it.
Ownership falls back to the escalation path the escalation was sent to. It can be responded to by:
  • Anyone who was paged
  • Anyone who holds the permission globally
  • Members of the team that owns the escalation path, with the permission granted to their team
No. Alerts are still auto-resolved as normal, regardless of who triggers it. These permissions only govern people resolving alerts directly.
Yes. Anyone who holds the permission globally can act on any alert or escalation. This is useful for keeping a small set of administrators who can step in across teams.