To set your teams up for success, we highly recommend documenting your workflow and publishing training materials on your internal wiki. This ensures new users are onboarded quickly and understand the full power of PagerDuty.
To download a copy, click here for responders and here for administrators.
Getting started with PagerDuty: For On-Call Responders
PagerDuty is an incident management platform that provides reliable incident alerting via email, push, SMS, and phone, as well as automatic escalations, on-call scheduling, and other functionality to help teams detect and fix infrastructure problems quickly.
How can I log in?
- To log in to our PagerDuty account, visit {subdomain}.pagerduty.com.
- If you have an iOS/Android mobile device, search for “PagerDuty” in the App or Play store.
- If you do not have an iOS/Android device, you can access PagerDuty from your mobile phone by going to {subdomain}.pagerduty.com or by going to the mobile site (m.pagerduty.com).
What should I do after I log in?
Configure your user profile to make sure you can receive notifications:
- To navigate to your user profile, click on the icon at the top right corner of the web app and select My Profile.
- From the Contact Information tab, add the phone/SMS numbers and email addresses where you would like to receive notifications from PagerDuty.
- To register your mobile device to receive push notifications, you will need to download the PagerDuty app for iOS/Android and log in.
- From the Notification Rules tab, add all of the preferred contact methods you would like to be notified at when you are assigned to PagerDuty incidents.
*Important: When setting up your high-urgency notification rules, check the escalation policies where you are on-call. If you are on-call in an escalation policy that escalates incidents after 10 minutes, you should set your notification rules to 9 minutes or less.
How do I know when I am on-call?
Here are suggestions on how to keep track of your on-call responsibilities.
What can I do when I am assigned to an incident?
You will have {escalation time out #} minutes to respond to the notification before the incident automatically escalates to the next level of the escalation policy.
There are 3 options for responding to PagerDuty notifications:
Acknowledge the incident if you are going to work on the issue.
- Aknowledging means that you are taking ownership of the incident and you will take responsibility to ensure that the incident is resolved.
- You will have {escalation time out #} minutes to acknowledge an incident before it is escalated to the next on-call engineer.
- After acknowledging an incident, you will have {incident acknowledgement time out #} minutes to resolve it. If you do not resolve it within that time frame, then the incident will re-notify you and whoever else is on-call that this incident is still open.
- If you need more time to work on the incident, snooze the incident after it has been acknowledged.
- If you need to contact additional users or teams, you can add responders with conference details after acknowledging the incident.
Resolve the incident if you know the issue has already been resolved.
- You should only do this for incidents that will not be automatically resolved through email or the API.
Escalate, reassign or add responders to the incident if the issue requires the attention of another team or user.
- You can escalate incidents to other levels of your escalation policy.
- You can reassign incidents to individual users or different escalation policies.
- Escalating/reassigning an incident will prompt PagerDuty notifications to go out to the new assignee(s).
What phone numbers are PagerDuty alerts sent from?
Download a vCard of PagerDuty’s phone numbers for notifications.
What else should I know?
Be aware of bundled alerts and information included in alerts.
Getting started with PagerDuty: For Administrators
PagerDuty is an incident management platform that provides reliable incident alerting via email, push, SMS, and phone, as well as automatic escalations, on-call scheduling, and other functionality to help teams detect and fix infrastructure problems quickly.
As the PagerDuty administrator for your team, you are responsible for configuring and managing your team’s schedule, escalation policies, and services. You will also be responsible for training your team and ensuring that they understand how to use PagerDuty.
You will receive an email invitation to log in to our PagerDuty account.
Step 1: Set up your account
Log in to PagerDuty and set up your team:
-
Go to Configuration > Users > Add Users
Users will receive an email invitation to login to the account when you add them. -
Go to Configuration > Schedules > + New On-Call Schedule
On-Call Schedule FAQs
On-Call Schedule Examples -
Go to Configuration > Escalation Policies > + New Escalation Policy
Escalation Policy Best Practice Tips -
Go to Configuration > Services > + New Service
Service Set Up Best Practice Tips -
Go to Configuration > Teams > + New Team
‘Teams’ are an organizational feature
Step 2: Train your team
Send your team the link to the wiki page and host a training with our Responder Training Slide Deck.
Step 3: Start triggering incidents
Reference PagerDuty integration guides to configure your PagerDuty services with the appropriate tool: https://www.pagerduty.com/integrations
For a copy of the above articles, click here for responders and here for administrators.