As a PagerDuty responder, your primary responsibility will be responding to incidents when they are assigned to you. PagerDuty enables you to manage incidents your way so that you can get notified and take action on issues immediately, from any device, wherever you may be.

Step 1: Set up your user profile

It’s important to configure your user profile according to your preferences so you receive notifications via the most effective methods. The first tab of your user profile is Contact Information where you will configure a phone number, SMS text number, email and device for push notifications.

Next, there’s the notification rules tab where you will setup and manage how you want to be contacted for different types of incidents.

Step 2: Review how you will respond to incidents

Once you’ve setup your contact methods and notification rules, you’re ready to start receiving notifications.

Let’s talk about what to do when an incident is assigned to you.
 

Acknowledge or Reassign

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 another person or team, you can reassign to a different escalation policy (or user) which will restart the notification process to that team.

Assess Impact and assign a Priority

Once the incident has been acknowledged, you need to assess the impact and determine actionable next steps. You can assign a priority to an incident which defines the impact and gives you common language and criteria when communicating about incidents. It also provides more visibility into which incidents are most business critical by color coding and moving them to the top of the incident dashboard view.

Notify additional users and teams

Add Responders: If an incident is a widespread issue, add responders to create a multi-team response. Responders are any individuals who are directly involved with responding to and resolving an incident.

Inform Business Stakeholders: In addition to adding responders to an incident, you have the ability to proactively inform business stakeholders by subscribing them to an incident. Users who are subscribed to an incident, will receive a notification when a status update is posted.

Resolve the Incident

Once you are confident that service has been fully restored, resolve the PagerDuty incident.

When an incident is assigned to you, you have the option to acknowledge the incident if you are taking ownership, or you can reassign if it belongs to another team. Once acknowledged, you can add responders if the incident requires a multi-team response, you can notify business stakeholders by adding them as subscribers, and ultimately, you will resolve the incident once service has been fully restored.

Mobile App

All of these actions can be taken directly in the mobile app so you do not have to log into the web app to respond to incidents.