Whether you’re just setting up your PagerDuty account for the first time, or we’ve been waking you up at 3 AM for years (sorry!), we recommend reviewing these tips to make sure you’re getting the most out of PagerDuty:
Use multiple notification rules…
…and multiple escalation rules
Avoid email-to-SMS gateways
️Get to know our APIs
Explore our Knowledge Base
Use integrations & extensions to extend our functionality
Stay updated via our social media channels
Leverage push and email notifications unlimited globally
Choose your monitoring solution carefully
Reach out for help & tell us what you think! Use multiple notification rules…
Ensure that each user has multiple notification rules 1, including phone calls. Users with multiple notification methods and rules in place are more likely to respond promptly and reliably.
Tip: It’s a good idea to stagger your notifications (i.e. push or SMS notification first, an initial phone call after a few minutes, then a follow-up phone call a few minutes after that) so you don’t get overwhelmed with multiple notifications all coming in at once, or end up missing them.
…and multiple escalation rules
Avoid setting up escalation policies with only one level. You’ll want to implement multiple levels with different people so that if the first person doesn’t respond to or resolve an issue, you’ll have a fail-safe in place to tackle the problem.
Avoid email-to-SMS gateways
These may appear attractive to users abroad, but they are less reliable than direct SMS messages and provide an additional point of failure. Based on customer reports, we recommend against using these.️Get to know our APIs
PagerDuty’s APIs are invaluable for requests that extend beyond our current feature set.
REST APIs
Our REST API 2 covers most of the functionality of our web interface with additional benefits. For instance, it can be used to create schedules of arbitrary length and overrides which are too difficult to repeatedly create manually. The REST API can be particularly useful for automated creation (of schedules, users, etc.) and custom reports.
Events APIs & Custom Event Transforms (CET)
The Events APIs 1 and CETs 1 can be used to trigger alerts and incidents from automated services (i.e. monitoring systems).
Want to create incidents from human-triggered actions? Use the REST API’s incident creation method.
Tip: If you aren’t sure which APIs to use, or the proper methods to interface with our APIs, there are a number of open source tools you can use as a reference.
Explore our Knowledge Base
You’ll find explanations of our terms, sample schedules, and example implementations, such has how to communicate effectively with stakeholders.
A surprisingly large number of support requests are resolved through links to our Community Discussions and Knowledge Base.Use integrations & extensions to extend our functionality
We partner with many companies to make solutions that benefit everyone, and often work with them behind the scenes to integrate our services into theirs.
For instance, using Zapier, you can script any number of combined actions, using a ready-made solution. For more information about a available integrations, visit our Integrations and Extensions page.Stay updated via our social media channels
PagerDuty Community Twitch channel
PagerDuty X, PagerDuty LinkedIn
PagerDuty Instagram Leverage push and email notifications unlimited globally
Customers on all modern pricing plans have access to unlimited worldwide push and email notifications, and should not expect incident notifications to affect their billing amount. Customers on our Professional, Business and Digital Operations plans also have an unlimited number of international SMS and phone notifications, while Free accounts can use 100 SMS and phone notifications per month.
For international users in particular, please ensure that you do not belong to a Do Not Call list, as some are very stringent and essentially prevent us from reaching you and your team members when you need them most. Choose your monitoring solution carefully
This may save you a number of alerting-related headaches down the line. Think carefully about your needs when choosing an implementation.
We support Nagios, New Relic, Pingdom, Zenoss and many others. Some monitoring tools, such as Nagios, will also automatically resolve incidents for you once an issue has been remediated. Reach out for help & tell us what you think!
Don’t hesitate to reach out to the PagerDuty Community or our support team with individual questions. Our support team has extensive experience with multiple implementations of monitoring services and may be able to help you with your needs.
Tip: When contacting support, include as many specific details as possible when creating your request, as this will enable us to move directly into troubleshooting.