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PagerDuty User Onboarding

Onboarding materials for new PagerDuty users, admins and managers

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34 Topics
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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 TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
Reporting: Using PagerDuty API to Create Custom Reports

Our customers have created all kinds of reports using our REST API to drill down on metrics and data that are important to them. Here are some examples:REST API v2 Incident details and body – This Python script exports all incident details for a specific incident or range of incidents and includes the incident body. Opsweekly – Etsy created this handy, multi-purpose tool with the premise that on-call time should be quantified. It generates a weekly report and lets on-call engineers track their notifications to assess the signal-to-noise ratio of the alerting system.Over time, your team can gather enough data to get in depth reports like, for example, what alerts wake people up the most, the average alert volume per day, and on-call improvements over the last year.Engineers can also integrate their Opsweekly to their Fitbits or Jawbone UPs to provide insight into how being on-call is affecting them. It tracks lost sleep time and Mean Time to get back to Sleep (MTTS), and provides data t

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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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8 days ago
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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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8 days ago
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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 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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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 TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
Integrations: Setting up Services and IntegrationsTutorial

A PagerDuty Service may represent an application, component, or team you wish to open incidents against.PagerDuty enables you to model your services as they actually exist within your infrastructure. You can drive more clarity and accountability by aligning services with component ownership so that the alerts your responders receive are not just from siloed tools.We recommend keeping the following items in mind when setting up your services:Reduce confusion with services and integrations by agreeing on naming conventionsIt’s common for multiple teams across an organization to use the same tools. Thus, it wouldn’t be very helpful for each team to name one of their services “Datadog”. Get together with your team and come up with naming conventions that everyone can use to differentiate their service with another team’s service.Some things you might want to include in your service names:Team namesBusiness UnitProduction environmentsProduct/featurePriority levelIntegration/Monitoring tool

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PagerDuty Community TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
Sample WorkflowsTutorial

PagerDuty can be integrated into different kinds of workflows. When thinking about how you want to integrate PagerDuty into your workflow, consider 2 things: How PagerDuty incidents will be triggered How users should respond to PagerDuty incidentsHere we document a few sample workflows for different types of teams:Workflow for a DevOps team Workflow for a CentralOps organizational structure Workflow for a NOC Workflow for a support/helpdesk/MSP team Workflow for a DevOps teamDevOps teams have direct ownership over the services that they build and deploy, meaning they are also responsible for being on-call should any issues arise.PagerDuty incidents are immediately assigned to the team who owns the impacted servicePagerDuty incidents are escalated to back-up on-call responders and managers How PagerDuty incidents are triggered?For a DevOps team, PagerDuty incidents are mostly triggered automatically either via email or via the API.How users respond to PagerDuty incidents?Generally, user

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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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8 days ago
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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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8 days ago
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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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8 days ago
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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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8 days ago
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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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8 days ago
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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 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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8 days ago
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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 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 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 TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
Adding Multiple Users at OnceTutorial

The Users page allows you to add multiple users via the dialog. If you need to add significant numbers at once there are several additional options.Via Single Sign-onThe easiest way is to enable auto-provisioning of new users on first login. This allows any user authenticated by your SAML 2.0 or OAuth 2.0 provider to create PagerDuty account. Single Sign-on can be configured by Account owners on all Standard & Enterprise accounts.With your Customer Success ManagerIf you’re looking to add 25 or more users, put them in a CSV file and contact support@pagerduty.com so they can import them for you.From other tools - users can be imported from: Active Directory 2 ServiceNow 1. Scroll to “Provisioning Users to PagerDuty” Use our API or a Script: our REST API has a /users endpoint that accepts users as JSON. To add multiple users call it in a loop. You can also use this Ruby script to import users from a CSVMore in PagerDuty’s Knowledge Base article: Import Users from a CSV.

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8 days ago
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PagerDuty Community TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
Creating a Blank ScheduleTutorial

Creating a blank schedule can be helpful when you are looking to only sporadically schedule users on call using overrides.Create a new schedule and put a single user on call in the future Save the schedule Edit the schedule you just created Remove the schedule layer that you just created with the user on call in the future Save the scheduleYou now have a blank schedule that you can fill out using custom overrides! 📚LEARN MORE: Knowledge Base: Schedule BasicsPagerDuty University FREE on-demand course: Schedules & Overrides 

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8 days ago
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PagerDuty Community TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
Notifications: Setting Up Notification RulesTutorial

The most important part of your user profile are your notification rules. Your notification rules determine how you want to be contacted and when every time a triggered incident is assigned to you.We recommend keeping the following items in mind when setting up your notification rules:Make sure your notification rules don’t exceed the minutes on your escalation policyIf you are on an escalation policy that escalates after 5 minutes and you have a notification rule set to 5 minutes or more, you will not receive that 5<= minute notification.In a case when the escalation policy escalates after 5 minutes, you will want to make sure you that your notification rules are 4 minutes or less.To check the escalation policies for which you are on-call for, click into the escalation policies listed under then When am I on-call next? widget on your user profile.Get notified repeatedly via different methodsEspecially if you’re a heavy sleeper or are responsible for critical incidents, we highly re

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8 days ago
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PagerDuty Community TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
Scheduling: Keeping Track of On-call ResponsibilitiesTutorial

If you don’t want to forget when you are about to go on-call, are curious about when you or a team mate is about to go on-call, or interested in knowing who is on-call right now, then we would recommend checking out some of the below suggestions to help keep track of on-call responsibilities.Set up on-call handoff notification rulesOn-call handoff notification rules allow you to receive email, SMS, and push notification reminders when you are about to go on-call.If you would like to receive on-call handoff notifications when a different team member is about to go on- or off- call, you can add your contact information to their user profile as a contact method and on-call handoff notification rule so that you can receive reminders when they are about to go on-call. Note that will need to have at least Admin access in order to modify another user’s profile.Some teams will do this to send an email to, for example, a distribution list every time a team member is about to go on- or off- call

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8 days ago
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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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8 days ago
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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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