Alert Lifecycle

Every alert in OpsFusion moves through a defined lifecycle and keeps a complete record of what happened to it — who was notified, on which channel, when, and what they did about it.

Alert Statuses

An alert is always in one of three states:

Status	Value	Meaning
Open	1	Active and requires attention. Notifications and escalations are in progress.
Acknowledged	2	Someone has taken ownership. Further escalation stops.
Closed	3	Resolved. No further notifications.

Acknowledged cannot be set via the API

Status 2 is reserved for human acknowledgement. Monitoring tools can open an alert (1) or resolve it (3) through the API, but acknowledging is something a person does — from the app, by replying to an SMS, or by pressing a digit during a phone call. See Send Alerts.

Acknowledging and Closing

You can acknowledge or close an alert three ways, and you don’t need to be at a computer for any of them:

• In the app — open the alert and use the acknowledge or close action. OpsFusion runs in the browser, so you can do this from your phone as easily as from a laptop — just open app.opsfusion.cloud in your phone’s web browser. There’s no app to install.
• Reply to the SMS — respond to the text message you received.
• Press a digit during the phone call — follow the prompt in the voice call.

The 3am case matters here: you can stop an escalation straight from your phone, without finding a laptop.

Acknowledging an alert stops further escalation. Closing it ends the alert entirely.

Duplicate Alerts

When a monitoring system keeps firing for the same underlying problem, OpsFusion does not page you again for every repeat.

If a new alert matches an existing open alert, OpsFusion increments a count on that existing alert and records a duplicate entry on its timeline, instead of creating a new alert and sending a fresh round of notifications.

An incoming alert is treated as a duplicate when all of the following match an existing open alert:

• The same account
• The same team
• The same title
• The same labels

Additional conditions:

• The existing alert must be open — a closed alert will not absorb duplicates, so a genuinely recurring problem still pages you again after you close it out.
• The existing alert must have been created within the last 7 days. Older alerts are not matched.

Reducing alert noise

Because matching includes labels, you control duplicate grouping through the labels you send. Alerts that share a title but carry different labels (for example a different service or instance) are treated as distinct problems and page separately.

The Alert Timeline

Every alert carries a full timeline. This is the record of everything that happened to the alert, in order, with a timestamp and the actor involved.

Timeline entries include:

Entry	What it records
email	An email notification was sent
sms	An SMS notification was sent
phone	A voice call was placed
ack	The alert was acknowledged, and by whom
closed	The alert was closed, and by whom
duplicate	A repeat of this alert arrived and incremented its count
escalationTo	The alert escalated to another person or team
escalationFrom	The alert escalated away from this recipient
muteEmail, muteSms, mutePhone	A notification was suppressed because the team was muted
muteAck, muteEscalationTo	An acknowledgement or escalation occurred while the team was muted

Alerts also record each individual notification delivery, including whether it went to a specific person or to an entire team.

Answering “who got paged?”

The timeline is the authoritative answer to questions like did the page actually go out?, who received it?, how long before someone acknowledged?, and did escalation fire when nobody responded? It is worth checking after any incident where the response felt slower than expected.

Muted entries

The mute timeline entries are deliberate: when a team is muted, OpsFusion still records what it would have sent. Muting suppresses the page — it does not erase the history. See Mute Notifications.

What’s Next?

• Mute Notifications — stop repeat paging during an active outage
• Audit Logs — track configuration changes across your account
• Usage Metrics — alert and notification volumes by team