---
title: Route alert episodes by severity in the experimental alerting system
description: How to route alert episodes to different workflows based on severity level in the experimental alerting system.
url: https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/docs-content/pull/6525/explore-analyze/alerting/kibana-alerting-experimental/action-policies/route-by-severity
products:
  - Kibana
applies_to:
  - Elastic Cloud Serverless: Experimental
  - Elastic Stack: Planned
---

# Route alert episodes by severity in the experimental alerting system
When your rules in the experimental alerting system produce alert episodes at different severity levels, you can route them to different workflows by creating separate action policies that are scoped to specific severity values using match conditions.
For example, you might page an on-call team for critical episodes while sending lower-severity episodes to a Slack channel for async review.

| Field                | Action Policy A        | Action Policy B                                             |
|----------------------|------------------------|-------------------------------------------------------------|
| **Match conditions** | `severity: "critical"` | `severity: "low" OR severity: "medium" OR severity: "high"` |
| **Notify per**       | Episode                | Episode                                                     |
| **Frequency**        | On status change       | On status change                                            |
| **Destinations**     | PagerDuty workflow     | Slack workflow                                              |

Each action policy evaluates alert episodes independently.
- An episode with `severity: "critical"` matches Action Policy A but not Action Policy B.
- An episode with `severity: "high"` matches Action Policy B but not Action Policy A.
- If an episode's severity changes mid-lifecycle, the action policies that match it change accordingly. For example, if an episode escalates from `high` to `critical`, Action Policy A starts matching and Action Policy B stops matching. Action Policy A fires because it has no prior notification record for that episode.


## Related pages

- [Manage severity escalation notifications](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/docs-content/pull/6525/explore-analyze/alerting/kibana-alerting-experimental/action-policies/severity-escalation): Understand what happens when an episode that has already matched an action policy changes severity.
- [Action policy reference](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/docs-content/pull/6525/explore-analyze/alerting/kibana-alerting-experimental/action-policies/action-policy-reference): Look up match condition fields, grouping modes, and frequency options.
- [Create and configure an action policy](https://docs-v3-preview.elastic.dev/elastic/docs-content/pull/6525/explore-analyze/alerting/kibana-alerting-experimental/action-policies/create-configure-action-policy): Set up an action policy with match conditions.