Understanding escalations

A common problem with resolving problems is that a host or a service may have blurred ownership. Often there is no single person responsible for a host or service, which makes things harder. 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 that is run prior to actual start to clean things up has entered an infinite loop. The owner of this machine gets notified. But the question is, who should be fixing it? The script owner? Or perhaps the database administrator? Often this may end up in different teams assuming someone else should resolve it—programmers waiting on database administrators and vice versa.

In such cases, escalations...