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We’re migrating organizations from our old alert grouping behavior to the new behavior, which unlocks functionality the old flow can’t support. Once your migration is complete, you’ll be able to tune the grouping behaviour within the alert route configuration.

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What’s changing

Old behavior
  • We’d only allow you to group alerts into an incident.
    • If you used Suggested alert grouping, we didn’t group alerts automatically — we’d ask whether you want to relate each alert to the incident.
    • If you used Automatic grouping, we’d create and then cancel escalations for each alert being grouped.
  • The grouping window always extended — i.e. if a new alert arrived, the window would extend again.
New behavior
  • Once you’re fully migrated, you have more control:
    • Choose whether the grouping window is extending or fixed.
    • Fine-grained control over how alerts joining a group then escalate.
    • Group alerts without creating an incident.
  • Automatic grouping — we attach alerts to the relevant alert group for you, and you can ungroup any that don’t belong.
  • We don’t automatically cancel any escalations made from alerts in a group, as we did if you had previously configured Automatic grouping in the old flow.

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How your migration will work

Whether you move across all at once or gradually depends on whether your organization has at least one alert route that currently groups alerts into incidents. If you don’t, there’s nothing to switch over, so we’ll migrate you fully from the start. You’ll be able to configure alert grouping straight away from your alert route configuration. We’ll notify you with a banner in the app once we’ve done this. If you do, we’ll start migrating you gradually. We do this to prevent both the old and new flows each creating an incident and double paging your users. During this period, some alerts will still group into incidents using the old flow while others start forming alert groups using the new one. Here’s how the handover works for a given grouping key (e.g. an alert title):
  • While alerts keep arriving within the grouping window, we continue grouping them into incidents using the old flow.
  • Once the grouping window closes, new alerts for that key start forming an alert group using the new flow.
  • Because the old flow’s window always extends, a grouping key only moves across once there’s a gap between its alerts longer than the grouping window duration.
  • An alert will only be processed by the old or new flow; never both.
While you’re migrating, you’ll get the core new experience — alerts group automatically and you can ungroup any that don’t belong — but the extra configuration options listed above are unavailable until the migration finishes. The migration finishes when, across all of your alert routes with grouping configured, there aren’t any open incidents that an alert could group into. We’ll email your organization’s owners when the migration begins, and again when it’s complete.