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Hi all,

I'm in the process of testing out the Events API V2 integration with my PagerDuty instance, and am having trouble making use of the `payload.timestamp` field of the Alert Event endpoint.

Specifically, when I am including the `timestamp` field in the request, I can't find it reflected anywhere in the alert that is created in PagerDuty. For example, I used a simplified version of the example payload given on the documentation page for sending an alert (https://developer.pagerduty.com/docs/send-alert-event):

```
{
  "payload": {
    "summary": "Example alert on host1.example.com",
    "timestamp": "2015-07-17T08:42:58.315+0000",
    "source": "monitoringtool:cloudvendor:central-region-dc-01:852559987:cluster/api-stats-prod-003",
    "severity": "info",
    "component": "postgres",
    "group": "prod-datapipe",
    "class": "deploy",
    "custom_details": {
      "ping time": "1500ms",
      "load avg": 0.75
    }
  },
  "routing_key": "samplekeyhere",
  "dedup_key": "samplekeyhere",
  "event_action": "trigger"
}
```

However, after successfully creating an alert from this webhook payload, I could not find where the `timestamp` field is stored. I checked the following locations:

* The 'Incidents' page shows the 'Created' field as the time at which the PagerDuty instance received the event, not the time in the provided timestamp.
* Inspecting the alert itself, the other fields (severity, summary, custom details) are shown but not the timestamp.
* Clicking the 'View Message' key led me to the 'Event Details' page which also did not include the timestamp field.

Is there something I'm missing, for example:
* There was something wrong with the timestamp I used? I did try using other timestamps that conform with the ISO 8601 format.
* The timestamp is not used anymore?
* Something else about the payload I used is incorrect?

Thanks in advance.

Hey ​@Sam,

The payload.timestamp field in the Events API v2 is accepted by PagerDuty, but it’s not displayed anywhere in the PagerDuty UI (incident details, alert details, or event details). The “Created” time you see in the UI always reflects when PagerDuty received the event, not the time you set in the timestamp field.

The timestamp is mainly for record-keeping or for use by any downstream integrations that might consume the raw event data. PagerDuty itself doesn’t use this field to backdate or otherwise alter the incident’s creation time, and it doesn’t show up in the web interface.

So, you’re not missing anything, your payload is correct, but PagerDuty just doesn’t surface that field in the UI. If you need to see the original event time, you’d have to track it in your own system or look at the raw event data if you’re exporting it elsewhere.

Hope this helps clear things up! Enjoy your weekend!


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