Overview

With routing rules, you can define granular logic to control how alerts reach your team. Instead of sending alerts through a single escalation policy, you can create flexible, condition-based rules to route them based on priority, time of day, tags, and more.

Routing rules examples

• Route alerts by priority:

  • Send priority 1 alerts to your primary escalation policy.
  • Send priority 2–4 alerts to Slack or Microsoft Teams.

• Route alerts by time of day:

  • During business hours, route alerts to an escalation policy.
  • After hours, route critical alerts to paging, and non-critical alerts to chat.

• Use Dynamic Urgency to automatically detect urgency from the monitor alert:

  • warn status ➝ low urgency
  • alert status ➝ high urgency

  The urgency of a page determines how end users are notified, based on their preferences.
  
  

• Trigger workflows (coming soon): Use routing rules to trigger automated workflows in response to matching alerts.

Send Pages to Slack or Microsoft Teams

When you route Pages to Slack or Microsoft Teams, Datadog sends a notification to the configured channel and creates a corresponding Page object in the On-Call platform. From Slack, team members can use interactive buttons to acknowledge, resolve, escalate, or declare an incident. This streamlines incident response without leaving the chat environment.

When a Page is acknowledged or resolved in Slack or Microsoft Teams, Datadog updates the original notification in place, without sending additional messages. This keeps responders focused by reducing noise and showing the current Page status directly in the original thread.

Routing rule syntax

Routing rules use Datadog query syntax and support multiple if/else conditions. Rules are evaluated from top to bottom, and the final rule must act as a fallback that routes all unmatched alerts to an escalation policy.

Supported attributes:

Best practices

• Balance visibility with urgency:
  • Use paging and escalation policies for critical alerts that require immediate action.
  • Use Slack or Teams for lower-severity issues that need awareness but don’t warrant an on-call response.

Further reading

Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:

Datadog On-CallDOCUMENTATION