When the Global Manager receives or creates a notification, it compares the notification against the filter for each policy and path. If the notification matches a policy and path filter, the Global Manager schedules the notification for escalation. When a level is reached, actions are executed first. When all actions have finished executing, the notification is scheduled to enter the next level. The notification will enter the next level after the amount of time set by the duration of the level.

The Last Notify time, or the LastNotifiedAt notification attribute, also determines whether a notification enters into an escalation policy. The Last Notify Time must be later than the time at which the path was enabled in order for the notification to escalate.

If a Global Manager is stopped and restarted, the Global Manager restores the state of escalated notifications. Notifications which are scheduled to escalate to a new level before the Global Manager stops are rescheduled based on the current time when the Global Manager is restarted.

The rescheduled escalation time accounts for the time that the Global Manager was not running. A rescheduled notification, however, will never escalate more than one level as a result of the time the Global Manager was not running.