# What should an engineering escalation include?

> A good escalation includes the customer impact, exact identifiers, steps to reproduce, what's already been checked, and the evidence that points to a bug. An engineer should be able to start investigating without asking a single follow-up question.

Canonical: https://www.decimal.app/glossary/escalations/what-should-an-engineering-escalation-include · Last reviewed: 2026-09-23

A good escalation includes the customer impact, exact identifiers, steps to reproduce, what's already been checked, and the evidence that points to a bug. An engineer should be able to start investigating without asking a single follow-up question.

## The checklist

- Customer and account ID, plan, and how many accounts are affected
- Request IDs and timestamps with time zone
- Expected versus actual behavior, in one sentence each
- Reproduction steps, or the reason it can't be reproduced
- Relevant log lines, traces, or screenshots
- What support already ruled out
- Severity and any SLA deadline

## What to leave out

- The full ticket thread pasted in without a summary
- Guesses presented as facts
- Urgency without impact data

Decimal writes the escalation for you, with the suspect code path and evidence attached. See [bug report](https://www.decimal.app/glossary/bug-report).

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