Create global paging policies

Attention:

Alpha features described in this document are provided by Splunk to you "as is" without any warranties, maintenance and support, or service-level commitments. Splunk makes this alpha feature available in its sole discretion and may discontinue it at any time. These documents are not yet publicly available and we ask that you keep such information confidential. Use of alpha features is subject to the Splunk Pre-Release Agreement for Hosted Services.

About global paging policies

To ensure consistent incident response and improve the mean time to acknowledge (MTTA), global administrators can enforce a primary paging policy across the entire organization. This feature prevents individual users from configuring inaccurate notification settings that lead to missed alerts or delayed responses.

Prerequisites

  • You must have Global Administrator rights in your Splunk On-Call organization.

  • You must have an active organization.

Configure a global paging policy

  1. Navigate to your Settings and select the Global Paging Policy tab.

  2. Creating the policy (first time only): If no Global Paging Policy exists yet, you will see a Create Global Paging Policy button. Click Create Global Paging Policy to create the policy and begin configuring the steps.

  3. Note on enforcement behavior (first-time creation): When the Global Paging Policy is created for the first time, enforcement is enabled automatically. After that, the enforcement state is maintained for future edits until you explicitly change it using the Enforce policy toggle button.

  4. Click on Apply to all users.
    Note: When this is enabled, the specific contact method selection (e.g., a specific phone number) will be available in the user profile section for each user. The policy defines just the method type (SMS, Phone, Push, Email). To understand how the contact is resolved, refer to How contact methods are resolved.
  5. Once a policy is created, you will see an Enforce policy toggle button that lets you activate or deactivate enforcement for the organization.
  6. Click Apply to all users to save changes to the Global Paging Policy. If Enforce policy is active, clicking Apply to all users will save/update the policy and apply it to all users. If Enforce policy is inactive, clicking Apply to all users will save the policy changes, but it will not be applied widely until enforcement is enabled.

Implementation latency

In large organizations (e.g., 2,000+ users), it may take up to 20 minutes for the new policy to propagate to every user profile. During this transition period, the existing paging policies will remain active for incoming alerts.

How contact methods are resolved

If a user has not assigned a specific contact, the system uses the following logic:

  • Missing Contact Methods: If a policy requires a method (for example, Phone) that a user has not set in the user profile page, the first available verified contact of that type will be used. If the first verified contact is not available, the policy defaults to push notifications.
  • Multiple Contact Methods: The system defaults to the first phone number, the first registered mobile device for push, and the first email address listed on the user profile. This method applies only if the contact is not set by the user from the user profile page.

Result

After the policy is applied, users with other roles (User, Team Admin, Alert Admin) will not be able to see the Primary Paging Policy and Custom Paging Policies sections, and also see a notification that the global paging policy is being enforced.

Other considerations

If your organization has multiple global administrators, only the most recently saved policy will take effect. Enforcing a policy ensures other users can't opt-out of critical notification steps.