Understanding escalations

A common problem with resolving problems is that a host or a service may have unclear ownership. Often, there is no single person responsible for a host or service, which makes resolution of the problem difficult. It is also typical to have a service with subtle dependencies on other things, which by themselves are small enough not to be monitored by Nagios. In such a case, it is good to include lower management in the escalations, so that they are able to focus on problems that haven't been resolved in a timely manner.

Here is a good example: a database server might fail because a small Perl script, which is run prior to actual start and cleans things up, has entered an infinite loop. The owner of this machine is notified. But the question is, who should be fixing it? The script owner? Or perhaps the database administrator? Often, this ends up in different teams assuming someone else should resolve it—programmers waiting on database administrators and vice versa...