PagerDuty

PagerDuty is an incident management platform designed to ensure critical issues get the right attention at the right time. It aggregates alerts from monitoring tools like Datadog, New Relic, and Prometheus, intelligently routes them to on-call engineers via push notifications, SMS, and phone calls, and provides a central war room for coordinating incident response. With automated escalations, schedules, and post-incident analytics, PagerDuty reduces downtime and alert fatigue.

Best for: DevOps, SRE, and IT teams responsible for 24/7 service availability who need reliable on-call alerting and incident coordination. Particularly valuable for organizations with complex escalation policies, multiple monitoring tools, or regulatory requirements for incident documentation and response SLAs. Teams running critical infrastructure or customer-facing services depend on PagerDuty for uptime.

Common Questions

How does PagerDuty alerting work?
PagerDuty receives alerts from your monitoring tools via integrations or API. When an incident is triggered, it notifies the on-call engineer via push notification (mobile app), SMS, and phone call based on your notification rules. If not acknowledged within a set timeframe (e.g., 5 minutes), it automatically escalates to the next person or team. Incidents can be manually or automatically resolved when the underlying issue is fixed.

What integrations does PagerDuty support?
PagerDuty integrates with 700+ tools including Datadog, New Relic, Grafana, Prometheus, Splunk, AWS CloudWatch, Zendesk, Jira, ServiceNow, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and virtually every monitoring, ticketing, and communication platform. Most integrations are bi-directional, allowing you to acknowledge incidents from Slack or create tickets from PagerDuty.

How does on-call scheduling work?
PagerDuty provides a visual schedule builder where you define rotation patterns (weekly, daily, custom), set time zones, and assign team members to shifts. Supports follow-the-sun schedules across global teams, automatic shift handoffs, and temporary overrides for vacations. The mobile app shows who's on-call and allows schedule swaps with team approval.

What's the difference between incidents and alerts?
An alert is a single notification from a monitoring tool (e.g., "CPU > 90%"). An incident is PagerDuty's grouping of related alerts with assigned responder, timeline, and resolution workflow. Event intelligence automatically groups similar alerts into one incident to reduce noise. One server failure might generate 50 alerts but create a single incident for the team to resolve.

Pricing & Plans

• Free: 10 services, 1 user, limited features (good for testing only)
• Professional: $21/user/month (annual) or $25/month (monthly), unlimited services, advanced alerting
• Business: $41/user/month, adds stakeholder licenses, visibility console, custom roles
• Digital Operations: $60/user/month, adds event intelligence, advanced analytics, auto-remediation

Most teams pay for 5-20 full users (on-call engineers) plus free stakeholder access for managers. Typical cost: $500-$2,000/month.

Limitations

• Per-user pricing adds up: While only on-call engineers need full licenses, costs scale quickly for larger engineering organizations with multiple teams on rotation.
• Alert overload without proper filtering: Without careful integration configuration and intelligent grouping, you can create alert fatigue where teams ignore notifications. Requires thoughtful threshold tuning.
• Mobile app dependency: Reliable incident response depends on engineers having phones with good connectivity and the PagerDuty app installed and configured—problematic in poor network areas.

Getting Started

1. Sign up at pagerduty.com (free trial available, no credit card required)
2. Create an on-call schedule and assign team members to shifts
3. Define escalation policies (who gets notified if incident isn't acknowledged)
4. Create services (represent systems you monitor, like "Production API")
5. Connect integrations from your monitoring tools (Datadog, Grafana, AWS, etc.)
6. Test alerting by triggering a test incident
7. Install the PagerDuty mobile app and enable critical notifications

Start simple with one service and schedule, then expand as you learn the platform. Use event rules to suppress low-priority alerts during business hours.