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PagerDuty User Onboarding

Onboarding materials for new PagerDuty users, admins and managers

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39 Topics
PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
The Onboarding ChecklistTutorial

The Onboarding Checklist will guide you through the PagerDuty implementation experience from planning to launch. Download a copy of the onboarding checklistWe’ve identified key milestones in each phase to make sure you’re set up for success. Be sure to reference the links and set clear dates to keep you on track along the way! The Planning PhaseGoals and Success Metrics Establish User Roles Outline Desired Workflow: Sample WorkflowsThe Configuration PhaseAdd/Import Users Onboard Admins and Managers PagerDuty University Training: https://university.pagerduty.com/admin-account-owner-permissions Admin & Account Owner Permissions Create an On-Call Schedule PagerDuty University Training: Schedule & Overrides Create an Escalation Policy PagerDuty University Training: Escalation Policies Configure Services and Integrations - we integrate with over 700 tools - view our Integration Guides PagerDuty University Training: Creating a Service with Integrations Trigger a Test Incident to Test

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PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
Creating a Shadow Schedule to Onboard New Employees

Some customers want to have their new employees shadow the on-call team as part of their onboarding. There are two simple ways to accomplish this:Creating an On-Call Shadowing Schedule:Create a blank scheduleAdd the shadowing schedule to the escalation policy that these new users will be shadowing As you onboard new users to your team, temporarily add them to the schedule using overrides If you’re onboarding a lot of people simultaneously, it might be helpful to create a shadowing schedule for each team. You can automate the process of adding shifts by utilizing our API.Having Users Temporarily Shadow an On Call Team 24/7:Add the new user to your PagerDuty account Locate the escalation policy that this user will be shadowing Add the user directly to the appropriate level of the escalation policy Remove the user once their shadowing time period ends

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PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
PagerDuty University: Instructor-Led Training

PagerDuty offers tailored instructor-led training sessions that cover both foundational and advanced topics, ensuring flexibility in scheduling and location to meet your team’s specific needs! Browse all instructor-led trainings and enroll: PagerDuty University Instructor-Led Training

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PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
PagerDuty University: Certifications

Whether you’re an IT professional, a developer, or a business leader, PagerDuty certifications validate your expertise in optimizing your organization’s response to incidents, ensuring maximum uptime, and minimizing downtime.PagerDuty University offers a unique blend of product and thought-leadership certifications, focused on skills that are highly sought after in today’s digital world. Join the community of certified PagerDuty professionals who are shaping the future of real-time operations! Learn more and enroll: PagerDuty University Certification

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PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
PagerDuty University: On-Demand FREE Courses

PagerDuty University offers a self-paced and fully on-demand learning resource that brings together dozens of free courses that walk learners through every step of the process of using PagerDuty. The entirely free courses detail the setting up, the scheduling, the mobile app, and more.From PagerDuty 101 to Thought Leadership, learn at your own pace with PagerDuty University’s on-demand courses! Find more and enroll: PagerDuty University On-Demand 

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PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
PagerDuty University: 101 Live Training with Q&A

The PagerDuty University team leads lives PD 101 trainings to give new managers and responders an opportunity to learn PagerDuty best practices. These 30 minute sessions will be offered Monday-Thursday once monthly. Choose your preferred timezone and register for the next training here Who should attend?Incident responders Admins/managers Account owners New Users Customers Folks in a trialWhat’s covered?Invite users to your account Create schedules and overrides Set up escalation policies Configure services and integrations Utilize extensions and API access keys Add teams Respond to incidents Manage user profilesCan’t make any of the dates? Submit any questions to pdusupport@pagerduty.com!

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PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
Integrations: Making it Easier for Teams to Trigger Incidents

Incidents can come to PagerDuty in many different ways. Often times, events are automatically sent to PagerDuty via the Events API when certain thresholds are met in your monitoring tools. However, there may be some instances when a user needs to manually trigger an incident, or perhaps you need a way for other teams (outside PagerDuty) to page the on-call responder for a critical issue.Check out the below suggestions to make it easier for teams to trigger incidents and notify on-call responders.Send an email from your inbox to trigger an incidentThe easiest way to trigger an incident (without logging in or being a user in PagerDuty) is by sending an email.If you have an email integration 1 set up on your account, you can have people within your organization (or even your customers) send an email to one of your integration’s email addresses. This will then trigger an incident in PagerDuty and notify who is on-call.Here are some ideas for managing these email addresses: Post the relevan

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PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
Integrations: Using Multiple Integrations Per Service to Represent your Systems

With the ability to add more than one integration per service, PagerDuty enables you to model your services as they actually exist within your infrastructure. Benefits include:The ability to drive more clarity and accountability by aligning services with component ownership so that alerts are not just from siloed tools Creating a single, consolidated service dashboard in PagerDuty for each of your internal systems Better control of maintenance windows for a particular service Responders will be able to more easily diagnose which system is having problems, leading to lower resolution times Better leverage PagerDuty’s analytics capabilities for a more complete view of which systems are having problems. Reporting by service on the System Report will show accurate incident counts, MTTA, MTTR, and escalation counts for all monitoring tools tied to each system, not just one. This also allows you to see which components are healthy, and which are having consistent problems that may need to be

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PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
Incidents: Creating Transparency Across Teams

Often times, it’s not just the people on-call who need to know about an incident. Managers and other parts of the business (Support, Sales, etc) may also need to be aware of incidents that arise. Whether these teams are in PagerDuty or not, there are many ways to keep others informed about incidents and events that are triggered in PagerDuty.Here are some of our recommendations and best practice tips for creating transparency in your organization:Creating transparency for users that exist in PagerDuty Add managers to escalation policiesTo increase visibility into alerts on certain services and escalation policies, a manager (or any other user/schedule) can be added to the first-level of an escalation policy along with the first user/schedule on-call so that the manager is notified about incidents that are triggered.Additionally, if the manager added status update notification rules to their profile, they can gain even more visibility into incidents with alerts, but setting up notificat

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PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
Notifications: Making your Escalation Policies Meaningful

Escalation policies determine who is notified when an incident is triggered and what should happen if nobody responds to that incident.We recommend keeping the following items in mind to make your escalation policies more meaningful:Check for schedule gapsIf the schedules that you are adding to your escalation policies have schedule gaps, check to make sure that there is somebody on-call at the times that you need an incident to trigger.The reason for this is because incidents will not be created if nobody is on-call in an escalation policy; incidents can only be created if somebody is on-call on any level of an escalation policy.Example:If you have an escalation policy with 3 levels, each containing a schedule where nobody is on-call between 6pm-9am, then if an event comes in at 10pm, no incident will trigger and nobody will be notified.If you have an escalation policy with 3 levels, with the first 2 levels containing schedules where nobody is on-call between 6pm-9am and the last leve

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PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
Scheduling: Effective Start / End Practices for On-Call Scheduling

Is the concept of an on-call rotation new to your team? Or does your existing on-call rotation need some tweaking since more people are being added to a rotation?If so, we recommend reading some of our best practice tips for setting up your on-call schedules:Exchange Shifts During Business HoursThe most popular time to handoff your on-call shift is Midnight, followed by 8:00 AM and 9:00 AM, then 5:00 PM and 6:00 PM. Despite the popularity of the midnight swap, as PagerDuty, we recommend having your handoff occur during business hours, preferably when both parties are present in the office. Unless you both happen to be in the office at midnight, in which case, go home.Switching your shift while on-site gives you the opportunity to talk to the next person going on-call about any issues that occurred during the previous shirt or to give a heads up on anything they may want to be on the look-out for.At GREE, their team syncs up every Monday morning to review alerts from the previous week,

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PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
Some Opinions on “How should I set up my Pager Notifications?”

An extremely common question that I receive when introducing a new team to PagerDuty (or any notification tool, really), is “how should I set up my notifications?”Here’s an answer that has worked well for me.A Sample Notification Escalation policyNotify on AssignmentThis is a sample notification policy to alert me when an incident is assigned to me. It’s intention is to be “helpfully persistent”. This is catered to my order-of-notification preference, as well as my “dexterity issues” during the wee hours. Feel free to tweak as desired.| Timeframe | Method || ----------- | ------ || Immediately | Email || Immediately | Push || 1 Minute | Push || 2 Minutes | SMS || 3 Minutes | Call |One common mistake is to have all notification types trigger at the same time. Unfortunately, what ends up happening is that in the time that it takes you to start responding to the one notification, another will trigger on top of the first. You can’t acknowledge the Push Notification before the SMS comes in,

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PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
Use Namespacing on Services, Escalation Policies or On-Call Schedules

If you want to group your services, escalation policies, or on-call schedules, you can do so using Teams, or by using a standardized naming scheme (i.e. a standardized prefix). The example below shows a set of services with the prefix Beam -.You can quickly sift through your services, escalation policies, and on-call schedules by searching for the desired prefix (shown below). While the example shows the Services list, the Escalation Policies, Schedules, and other lists also have search functions.

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PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
Follow-the-Sun Schedules

So you want a follow-the-sun response to your alerting?Create s Schedule, selecting UTC as the time zone because it doesn’t change. Start with any one of your regions Select the user(s) for this region Hit the Restrict on-call shifts to specific times checkmark If this is a 24x7 schedule, just the first times-of-day option and add your window in UTC (e.g. 06:00 - 20:00) If this schedule has gaps (like weekends), you’ll need the second option, creating additional blocks until you’ve reached your desired coverage.NOTE: If you end up with holes in your Schedule, alerts received during these holed times will be Suppressed (blackholed).Select your Rotation type and choose a Handoff time which matches the start of your natural blocks (e.g. Monday at 06:00 as per the example above) Repeat with any other region(s), adding a new Layer for each region Add the Schedule to an Escalation Policy (or multiple Policies if you have further unique escalation points, e.g. for SME On-calls).NOTE: During D

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PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
Best practices with Using Advanced Permissions

Advanced Permissions allow you to specify different levels of permissions for users across your PagerDuty account and within your team. These levels of permissions include object-level permissions, team-level permissions, and account-level permissions. You can read more about advanced permissions here.If you’re interested in adopting advanced permissions within your organization, consider the following best practices tips:1. Follow the principle of least privilege: Grant users as much access as they need to be effective in their role. In practice, this means you’ll want to limit the number of users with a Global Admin or Manager base role, especially at larger organizations. Everybody else should have either an observer, responder , or restricted access base role with additional permissions given at either the team or object level.2. Add all users and escalation policies to a team to set team roles: Team roles give users specific access to a team, especially when they have limited acce

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PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
PagerDuty Analytics Best Practices

Table of ContentsPagerDuty Analytics features are powered by use of the PagerDuty product platform. While all customers can get value from PagerDuty Analytics, proper use and configuration of certain features that are available in all plans can enhance the value of this add-on product.User TimezonesThroughout the various PagerDuty Analytics user experiences, metrics are often surfaced by time of day. In order to understand the true impact of incidents on responders, all users should ensure that the timezone is set accordingly in their user profile.TeamsOperational Review Analytics uses PagerDuty’s Teams feature to segment views into the data. Ensuring that teams are defined, match your org chart, and all users are a member of at least one team will result in a richer PagerDuty Analytics experience. Check out our Knowledge Base article on Team On-Call Handoff Reviews for more details.ServicesThe Service object in PagerDuty can be used in a variety of ways, but it is a best practice to s

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PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
Welcome to PagerDuty!

Learning a new tool can sometimes feel overwhelming and it’s hard to see the forest through the trees. The goal of this document is to give you a transparent breakdown of key features to focus on for each of the critical milestones with PagerDuty. We hope this will be just as helpful on day 1 of your PagerDuty Journey as it will be on day 600.Be sure to reference the links (in the downloadable version here) and don’t hesitate to reach out to support@pagerduty.com if you get stuck or have a questions.

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PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
Notifications: Suggestions on When to Notify One vs Many

Multi-User Alerting is the ability to notify multiple users (up to 10 users/schedules on Lite and Basic plans, up to 50 on Standard and Enterprise plans) at once when an incident has been triggered within a service. Multi-User Alerting looks like this in an escalation policy, with multiple people and schedules listed for one escalation rule:Single-User Alerting notifies one person or one on-call schedule when an incident is triggered. Single-User Alerting looks like this in an escalation policy, with one person or schedule listed for one escalation rule:So when should you use one type of notification over the other? Single-User AlertingSingle-User Alerting works best for:Notifying one person at a timeIf one person tends to be the main escalation point for an open incident, then you will want to use Single-User Alerting. Single-User Alerting works best when you have a clearly definable escalation path that would only notify one person at a time.Allowing one person to focus on an issueWi

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PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
Reporting: Making Your Metrics Meaningful

The way your team uses PagerDuty can have a significant impact on how Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA) and Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR) are tracked, so we wanted to share a few best practices to make the metrics meaningful.Develop guidelines for acknowledging incidentsThe time it takes to respond to an incident is a key performance metric. To understand your time to response in PagerDuty, we recommend that you acknowledge an incident when you begin working on it. Furthermore, if you’re on a multi-user escalation policy, this practice is even more important – as soon as someone acknowledges the incident it stops escalating and no one else on that level is notified.Many high-performing Operations teams set targets for Ack time because it is one metric teams typically have a lot of control over. PagerDuty’s Team Report can show you trends in your TTA so you can see whether you are falling within your targets, and how the TTA varies with incident count.Define when to resolveWe recommend reso

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PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
Reporting: Operational Metrics You Should Track

Note: The content below was originally published on our PagerDuty blog.​​​​​Living in a data-rich world is a blessing and a curse. Flexible monitoring systems, open APIs, and easy data visualization resources make it simple to graph anything you want, but too much data quickly becomes noisy and un-actionable.We’ve blogged, spoken, and thought hard about what you should monitor and why from a systems perspective, but what about monitoring data on your operations performance? We worked with with a large number of PagerDuty customers as we built out our new Advanced Reporting feature, including some of the most sophisticated operations teams out there. We’d like to share some specific metrics and guidelines that help teams measure and improve their operational performance.Raw Incident CountA spike or continuous upward trend in the number of incidents a team receives tells you two things: either that team’s infrastructure has a serious problem, or their monitoring tools are misconfigured a

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PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
A PagerDuty Checklist to Help in your Operational MaturityTutorial

Lots of people talk about “operational maturity”…being more “mature” in your operations by proactively managing your teams, processes, applications, systems, and infrastructure. We mapped out what this maturity looks like as a progression of different levels:The customers that we’ve shown this graph to usually bucket themselves under the “Responsive” category, which then leads to the questions - “What do each of these maturity levels look like in PagerDuty?”, “What do our teams need to be doing in PagerDuty to ‘get better’?, ”“How do we get to the next level? And then to the next?”The checklistThe checklist is broken out in a way that not only aligns with the Operations Maturity Levels, but that also aligns with the way we see a lot of teams maturing in their PagerDuty adoption. There are 5 levels in the checklist:Level 0: Foundations. These are the building blocks of PD. What every team who’s going to be responding to incidents and alerts should have set up to do anything in PD.Level

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PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
PagerDuty Checklists to Help Enable your Users and Teams

At PagerDuty, we’ve got a bunch of checklists that our new hires have to complete in order to be considered “properly onboarded” at our company. So why not create checklists for new PagerDuty users to help them get “properly onboarded” onto PagerDuty?That’s a great question, and one that my customer poised to me. They have full ownership of PagerDuty at their company, which means they administer PagerDuty licenses and help distribute education material across their new and existing users.But, we found that their new users–who were joining by the hundreds every month across multiple teams–didn’t seem to be properly learning some PagerDuty basics to get onboarded onto PD. They were missing the boat on some things, like not configuring their user profiles properly. We realized that we needed a more centralized document of onboarding education that could be distributed to the masses and that would be super easy to understand and follow. That’s when we thought of a checklist.We created 3 ch

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PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
Activity Report Metrics - What They Mean and How to Use Them

Welcome! This page is intended to shed more light on your Activity Report metrics - what we recommend as best practice and why these data points matter.Your email might contain some of the following data points:1. Number of high-urgency incidents - Incidents that require immediate responseMTTA (Mean time to Acknowledge): The average time between when an incident is triggered, and it is acknowledged by a user. Reassign, resolve, and escalation actions do not imply acknowledgement.MTTR (Mean time to Resolve): The average time between when an incident is acknowledged, and when it is resolved by a user.*Tip: You can view this at anytime by going to: https://YOURSUBDOMAIN.pagerduty.com/analytics/dashboards/operational-maturity2. Responders added to an incident - This includes actions like escalating, reassigning, and/or adding additional responders.What does your data point mean?NULL : No incident collaboration, could be signs of a siloed workflowTip: Try leveraging Response Plays to loop i

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PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
Retrieving Service Graph via the PagerDuty REST APITutorial

We had an interesting question on the PagerDuty Community forums regarding how to retrieve the list of services that make up a service graph using the PagerDuty REST API.Service graphs can be made up of a mix of technical and business services, called dependencies, but the most common starting place for them is with a business service. How you organize your business service is really a matter of what makes sense for your teams. There is no single endpoint query that will dump an entire service graph supporting a business service, so to get access to the whole graph, you’ll need to walk the graph.  Sample GraphIn my test account I have a set of services that make up my “Fabulous Shop”. Fabulous Shop is my business service. It is supported by another business service, Shipping Service. Fabulous shop has 5 technical dependencies: a frontend, a search backend, a cache, a shopping cart, and a database. The cache and the shopping cart both depend directly on the database. The service graph l

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PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
Responding to IncidentsTutorial

This article walks through how to respond to an incident when you’re on call. First, make sure your user profile is set up to receive notifications. You’ll define your contact methods (where you want to be contacted) and your notifications rules (how you want to be contacted).Next, let’s review how incidents are created. Typically a monitoring tool will detect an issue and send an event to PagerDuty. PagerDuty receives this event and creates an incident against a PagerDuty service. Tools can integrate with PagerDuty via API or email, or incidents can be manually triggered in the web app. If you are on-call for the service with the triggered incident, you will receive a notification via your preferred notification rules 1.Acknowledge or ReassignWhen you receive the notification, the first step is to acknowledge the incident if you are going to be taking ownership. This will assign the incident to you and stop it from escalating to the next person on call.If the incident belongs to anoth

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