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 policy
If 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 methods
Especially if you’re a heavy sleeper or are responsible for critical incidents, we highly recommend setting multiple notification rules at different contact methods to make sure that you are properly notified when an incident is assigned to you.
Sometimes these one-time notifications just aren’t enough, which is why we recommend setting up repeated notifications if the first ones don’t get your attention immediately (or if you are away from your phone/laptop when those first notifications arrive).
Don’t forget when you are about to go on-call
It’s never a good feeling to forget that you are on-call right when you receive your PagerDuty notification.
That’s why we recommend setting reminders - what we call, on-call handoff notifications - to remind yourself up to 48 hours in advance when you are about to go on- (or off-!) call.
Extra Tip: If you prefer reminders from your personal calendar or to just keep track of your rotation within your calendar, you can export a calendar feed of your on-call schedules from PagerDuty and import it into your personal calendar
Keep track of your incidents with updates
Status updates allow you to receive notifications when the incidents assigned to you have changed. Set these up on your profile so that you know when another team member acknowledges your incident, when your incident has been escalated, or when it has been resolved.