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 policies
To 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 notifications when incidents have been acknowledged, resolved, or escalated.

If this manager is not the primary responder for incidents though, it is recommended that they do not acknowledge, resolve, or escalate incidents before the on-call user has a chance to see it.
 

Subscribe stakeholders to incidents
Adding subscribers lets you notify stakeholders who aren’t directly involved with resolving the incident. This could be C-level executives concerned about the health of the company, or a Support team interacting with customers during an outage, for instance.

Creating transparency for users outside of PagerDuty
 

Push incidents into your collaboration/chat tool
Integrate PagerDuty with Slack, HipChat, Flowdock, Socialcast or any of our other Collaboration/Chat integration partners. This is a great way to let teams know when incidents are triggered, acknowledged, and resolved in real time, without having to manually alert everybody.

Publish incidents on an internal status page
Use a status page app such as StatusPage.io or Status.io. These tools will group PagerDuty services into components so you can quickly determine the status.

Create internal dashboards with our API
You can use our REST API to create internal dashboards to display open incidents.