Understanding the VictorOps Alert Routing Model

Background and Architecture

VictorOps operates on a push-pull model where alerts generated by monitoring tools are ingested via REST or email APIs, then routed through escalation policies defined per team or service. Each escalation policy can contain multiple steps, targets (users, rotations, teams), and fallback rules. Alert behavior is further shaped by routing keys, tagging strategies, and the use of dynamic team schedules.

In large organizations, escalation policies and routing keys are often updated automatically via IaC or CI pipelines, which increases the risk of drift, corruption, or referencing non-existent entities—leading to silent drops or misrouted alerts.

Root Cause: Stale or Corrupted Escalation Policy References

Symptom Patterns

  • Alerts appear in the VictorOps log ingestion UI but do not notify any user.
  • Some alerts are duplicated across multiple teams unexpectedly.
  • Incidents close automatically after creation without user acknowledgment.

Technical Root Cause

When an alert is sent with a routing key tied to an outdated or corrupted escalation policy (e.g., due to team renaming, policy deletion, or accidental overwrite via API), VictorOps may not throw a visible error. Instead, the alert is accepted but never routed, especially if the escalation policy resolves to an empty target group or invalid UUIDs. These corrupted references are often silently created when using Terraform modules or VictorOps API calls without idempotency safeguards.

How to Diagnose the Issue

Step-by-Step Debugging Flow

  1. Go to Timeline Search in VictorOps and filter by routing key and alert status.
  2. Find alerts marked as "ACK by System" or with immediate "Auto-Resolved" flags.
  3. Use the VictorOps REST API: /api-public/v1/policies and /api-public/v1/teams to list current escalation policies.
  4. Compare the routing keys in the alert payload against active policies. Look for mismatches.
{
  "routing_key": "backend-errors",
  "message_type": "CRITICAL",
  "entity_id": "service-A-error-502",
  "state_message": "Service A returned HTTP 502",
  "timestamp": 1721483496
}

Using VictorOps Audit Logs

Export and scan audit logs for escalation policy changes within the last 30 days. Focus on:

  • Deleted or renamed teams
  • Policy assignment drift
  • Unauthorized API changes from CI/CD bots

Common Pitfalls in Large-Scale Use

1. Dynamic Team Creation without Synchronization

Teams created via API without synchronizing routing keys and escalation policies often end up with broken routing.

2. Schedule Drift in Escalation Rotations

Calendar-based rotations may be misaligned across time zones, especially when DST or regional holidays aren't accounted for.

3. CI/CD Induced Policy Overwrites

Multiple pipelines writing to the same VictorOps policy can lead to overwrite loops or null targets.

Step-by-Step Fix

Short-Term

  • Use VictorOps Web UI to manually reassign routing keys to valid escalation policies.
  • Patch alert senders to use verified routing keys only.
  • Enable alerts on failed policy evaluations using the VictorOps diagnostics API.

Long-Term

  • Adopt a single source-of-truth model for team, routing, and escalation metadata.
  • Introduce integration tests in CI/CD pipelines to verify VictorOps policy integrity after every deploy.
  • Version all VictorOps config via IaC (e.g., Terraform) and enforce validation with pre-commit checks.
# Terraform validation snippet
data "victorops_team" "backend_team" {
  slug = "backend"
}

resource "victorops_escalation_policy" "backend_alerts" {
  name = "backend-policy"
  team = data.victorops_team.backend_team.id
}

Best Practices for Enterprise VictorOps Users

  • Enable detailed alert audit trails for 90+ days.
  • Use structured tagging to map services to routing keys predictably.
  • Build a VictorOps smoke-test job that sends synthetic alerts per routing key hourly.
  • Store escalation policies in Git and lint before deployment.

Conclusion

VictorOps provides powerful incident routing capabilities, but in complex or automated environments, alert routing can break silently due to corrupted escalation policies, dynamic team mismatches, or misconfigured CI pipelines. By combining proactive validation, audit logging, and integration tests, teams can eliminate these blind spots and build resilient alerting systems that scale with infrastructure growth.

FAQs

1. How can I test whether a VictorOps routing key is active?

Send a test alert using curl or the VictorOps Web UI and verify if the alert routes to an on-call user. You can also use the diagnostics API to trace its policy path.

2. What causes alerts to be "ACK by System" immediately?

This usually happens when escalation policies resolve to null targets or broken team references. It can also result from expired or deleted rotations.

3. Can Terraform safely manage VictorOps escalation policies?

Yes, but only if you implement safeguards like import validation, ID checks, and environment locking to prevent policy drift or accidental overwrites.

4. Why do some alerts show up in VictorOps UI but don't notify anyone?

This happens when the alert matches a routing key that exists but is mapped to an invalid or empty escalation policy. Validate policies via API to catch this early.

5. How do I prevent duplicate alerts across multiple teams?

Deduplicate alert rules upstream (e.g., Prometheus), and use explicit routing key-to-team mappings. Avoid wildcard team policies unless absolutely necessary.