On call schedule with delayed alerts

Hey there! 👋

Yes, this is possible! You can do it with support hours on the service. Here’s the idea:

• Alerts that come in overnight still create incidents, but as low urgency, so they don’t wake anyone up.
• When support hours start at 4 a.m., PagerDuty automatically raises any open, unacknowledged incidents to high urgency and notifies the on-call technician. Notifications keep going until someone acknowledges or resolves the incident.

How to set it up:

1. Go to the service’s Settings tab and click Edit next to Assign and Notify.
2. Under How should responders be notified?, choose Based on support hours.
3. Set the support hours to 4:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m. on the days you want. The times apply to each day you select. With a Monday–Friday 6 p.m.–6 a.m. shift, those early-morning windows fall on Tuesday to Saturday.
4. During support hours: high-urgency notifications, escalate as needed.
5. Outside support hours: low-urgency notifications, do not escalate.
6. Tick Raise urgency of unacknowledged incidents to high when support hours start, then save.

One important check: make sure your technicians’ low-urgency notification rules won’t wake them. For example, set them to email only, or remove them. Otherwise they’ll still get a call or push notification for low-urgency incidents overnight.

A couple of things to keep in mind:

• Any alert that comes in between 4 and 6 a.m. notifies the technician straight away, since that’s inside support hours.
• Outside 4–6 a.m., including during the day, alerts on this service are low urgency. If the service also needs to page people during the day, let us know and we can suggest other options.

Helpful docs:

• Configurable Service Settings: support hours and urgency
• Notification Rules: low- vs high-urgency notification rules

Hope that helps!