Group Member Roles

Purpose

Group Member Roles — Primary, Secondary, and Manager — decide the order in which users in a group are paged when an alert arrives. Getting them right is the difference between the correct person being woken up first and everyone on a team being woken up simultaneously.

Audience

Relevant for App Admins and in-group Managers

App Admins can set roles on any group. The Manager role on a specific group grants edit rights to that group — a Manager can update members, schedules, and out-of-office coverage without needing App Admin privileges.

Prerequisites

At least one group that contains one or more users.
App Admin platform role, or the Manager role on the group you want to edit.
Familiarity with Group Management (where group roles live).

The Three Member Roles

Role	When it fires	What else it controls
Primary	First responders. AlertOps pages Primary members first when an alert arrives at the group.	No in-group edit rights. Purely an escalation assignment.
Secondary	Backup responders. Paged if no Primary acknowledges within the escalation policy's wait window.	No in-group edit rights.
Manager	Final escalation. Paged after Primary and Secondary have both failed to respond within their windows.	Can edit the group — members, schedules, out-of-office entries. A Manager can also hold the Primary or Secondary role on top.

Group Member Roles are not the same as platform roles

Group Member Roles (Primary / Secondary / Manager) control where a user sits in the escalation order of one specific group. Platform Roles (App Admin, Basic, etc.) control what the user can do across the whole AlertOps account. A user has independent assignments for each — App Admin on the platform, Primary on one group, Manager on another.

Assign Group Member Roles

Relevant for App Admins and Group Managers

Go to Configuration → Groups and Schedules and open the group.
On the Members tab, each row has checkbox columns for Primary, Secondary, and Manager.
Tick the roles you want the user to hold. A user can hold more than one — for example, Primary and Manager together.
Use the sequence handle (⋮⋮) on the left of each row to drag members into the order AlertOps should page them within each role tier.
Changes save as you make them; there is no separate Save button on the Members tab.

Figure 1. Members tab — Primary / Secondary / Manager checkboxes next to each member row; the ⋮⋮ handle on the left sets sequence within a tier.

Sequence — Who Gets Paged First Within a Tier

When more than one user holds the same Group Member Role (for example, three Primaries), AlertOps needs to know who to page first. The sequence — the vertical order of members on the Members tab — is that tiebreaker. The member at the top of the list is paged before the member below them.

Drag the ⋮⋮ handle on the left of any row to reorder.
Sequence applies within each role tier independently: Primary sequence, Secondary sequence, Manager sequence.
If two members hold the same Role and you want them paged simultaneously, that is a job for the escalation policy (set a zero-wait step), not the sequence.

What the Manager Role Can Do Beyond Escalation

Assigning a user the Manager role on a group gives them edit rights scoped to that group. A Manager can:

Change the group's member order (sequence) on the Members tab.
Create, edit, and delete shifts on the Schedule tab.

Managers do not get edit rights outside those surfaces — group Profile edits, Access, and Governance remain App Admin territory.

Best Practices

Keep a clear intent for each tier — Primary for the first responder, Secondary for backup, Manager for final escalation. Document the intent in the group description so it is visible to anyone auditing the group later.
Promote at least one experienced member of each group to Manager so they can manage the group without filing an App Admin ticket for every rotation change.
When you migrate a group from Members-tab Primary/Secondary to shift-based roles, audit every shift's Primary / Secondary before relying on the rotation in production.

Don't

Assign Manager to everyone in the group. The role carries edit rights; reserve it for a small number of trusted leads.
Rely on "Primary = first responder" alone if you have shifts configured — the shift overrides the Members-tab setting. Check the active shift.
Use the sequence to try to achieve simultaneous paging. Configure the escalation policy instead.