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Starting with PagerDuty

Onboarding materials and best practices for new PagerDuty users, admins and managers

43 Topics
PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
Reporting: Making Your Metrics Meaningful

The way your team uses PagerDuty can have a significant impact on how Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA) and Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR) are tracked, so we wanted to share a few best practices to make the metrics meaningful.Develop guidelines for acknowledging incidentsThe time it takes to respond to an incident is a key performance metric. To understand your time to response in PagerDuty, we recommend that you acknowledge an incident when you begin working on it. Furthermore, if you’re on a multi-user escalation policy, this practice is even more important – as soon as someone acknowledges the incident it stops escalating and no one else on that level is notified.Many high-performing Operations teams set targets for Ack time because it is one metric teams typically have a lot of control over. PagerDuty’s Team Report can show you trends in your TTA so you can see whether you are falling within your targets, and how the TTA varies with incident count.Define when to resolveWe recommend reso

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PagerDuty Community Team
4 months ago
PagerDuty Community Team
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 Team
4 months ago
PagerDuty Community Team
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 Team
4 months ago
PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
PagerDuty Checklists to Help Enable your Users and Teams

At PagerDuty, we’ve got a bunch of checklists that our new hires have to complete in order to be considered “properly onboarded” at our company. So why not create checklists for new PagerDuty users to help them get “properly onboarded” onto PagerDuty?That’s a great question, and one that my customer poised to me. They have full ownership of PagerDuty at their company, which means they administer PagerDuty licenses and help distribute education material across their new and existing users.But, we found that their new users–who were joining by the hundreds every month across multiple teams–didn’t seem to be properly learning some PagerDuty basics to get onboarded onto PD. They were missing the boat on some things, like not configuring their user profiles properly. We realized that we needed a more centralized document of onboarding education that could be distributed to the masses and that would be super easy to understand and follow. That’s when we thought of a checklist.We created 3 ch

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PagerDuty Community Team
4 months ago
PagerDuty Community Team
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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PagerDuty Community Team
4 months ago
PagerDuty Community Team
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 Team
4 months ago
PagerDuty Community Team
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 Team
4 months ago
PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community TeamCommunity Manager
published in About the Community
What Other Channels Can I Use to Engage with the PagerDuty Community?

Looking to connect with the PagerDuty community beyond this online hub? Here are some great channels to consider:YouTube and LinkedIn Lives: Tune into our live sessions on YouTube and LinkedIn for real-time discussions, demos, and community updates. These platforms offer a dynamic way to interact with experts and fellow users.Social Media: Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram for the latest news, tips, and community spotlights. Engaging with our social media accounts is a great way to stay informed and join conversations.In-Person Conferences & Meetups: Attend our conferences and local meetups to network with other PagerDuty enthusiasts, participate in workshops, and gain hands-on experience.Page it to the Limit Podcast: Don’t miss our Page it to the Limit podcast for in-depth discussions on industry trends, expert insights, and community stories. It’s an excellent way to stay engaged while on the go.Explore these channels to expand your connections, deepen your knowledge,

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PagerDuty Community Team
4 months ago
PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community TeamCommunity Manager
published in About the Community
Make the Most of PagerDuty Commons: A New Member’s Guide

Hello, PagerDuty Commons Community!At first, navigating a community might feel a bit overwhelming with lots of activity and discussions. But here’s the secret: with a little focus, you can gain so much from just a small amount of time here. Want some tips?Search Before Posting: Before you start a new discussion, take a moment to search through existing topics. Chances are, someone else might have asked a similar question. You might even find the exact answer you need, saving you time and effort.Ask Clear Questions: You don’t need to be an expert to ask a good question. The key is to be clear and provide context. Including examples can make it easier for others to help you out.Join the Conversation: It can feel intimidating to jump into an ongoing discussion, especially when you don’t know anyone. But in community, everyone’s input is valuable. Don’t hesitate to share your thoughts—you’ll be surprised at how welcoming others can be.Share What You Know: The things you’re doing with Pager

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PagerDuty Community Team
4 months ago
PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
Publishing Internal Wiki Pages

To set your teams up for success, we highly recommend documenting your workflow and publishing training materials on your internal wiki. This ensures new users are onboarded quickly and understand the full power of PagerDuty. Download a copy of the onboarding checklists: Responder and Admin. Getting started with PagerDuty For On-Call Responders PagerDuty is an incident management platform that provides reliable incident alerting via email, push, SMS, and phone, as well as automatic escalations, on-call scheduling, and other functionality to help teams detect and fix infrastructure problems quickly.How can I log in? To log in to our PagerDuty account, visit {subdomain}.pagerduty.com.If you have an iOS/Android mobile device, search for “PagerDuty” in the App or Play store.If you do not have an iOS/Android device, you can access PagerDuty from your mobile phone by going to {subdomain}.pagerduty.com or by going to the mobile site (m.pagerduty.com).What should I do after I log in? Configure

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PagerDuty Community Team
4 months ago
PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
Getting Started as an Incident Responder

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 profileIt’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 incidentsOnce 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 ReassignThe first step is to

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PagerDuty Community Team
4 months ago
PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
Defining Goals and Success MetricsTutorial

 Check the PagerDuty Onboarding Checklist for a complete implementation process help guide Let’s talk about goals! The first phase, the planning phase, is all about defining goals and setting clear intentions for the onboarding experience. The first question is what are we trying to accomplish? How are we going to measure the success of this implementation? What does success mean to us? Having completed countless PagerDuty onboardings, we’ve found that users with clearly defined goals have an overall better implementation and more satisfied on-call responders. To help with this, we have identified the five steps of the incident response lifecycle which are:Optimize: Is it actionable?Notify: Is the right person notified at the right time?Assess: How severe is it? What is the impact?Resolve: How do we fix it?Prevent: How can we uncover trends and patterns? Of these, which step resonates the most for you? What are your biggest operational challenges? Where would you like to see the most i

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PagerDuty Community Team
4 months ago
PagerDuty Community Team
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 Team
4 months ago
PagerDuty Community Team
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

530
PagerDuty Community Team
4 months ago
PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
Accessing PagerDuty Analytics APIs with PythonTutorial

PagerDuty’s API provides access to the Analytics Insights features of your PagerDuty account, but getting the data you want out of the API endpoints might be a bit tricky. Most of the endpoints will require your requests to include a JSON document of the filters you want to apply to the data set, so they will look significantly different from other requests you might have been making to the PagerDuty REST API.The new UI for Insights provides teams with a lot of flexibility around what data they want to see reported. It also includes the ability to download the data as a csv file. For most folks that will be easier than building a custom solution, so check on your Insights page to see if you can get what you want directly! AnalyticsPagerDuty’s Analytics API provides a number of endpoints for you to use to collect and collate summary and aggregated data about incidents, services, teams, escalation policies, and individual responders. Each endpoint will have different data available.You’l

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PagerDuty Community Team
4 months ago
PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
Top 10 Best Practice TipsTutorial

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-

550
PagerDuty Community Team
4 months ago
PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
Responding to Incidents in PagerDutyTutorial

Let’s review what to do when an incident is assigned to you!Acknowledge or ReassignThe first step is to Acknowledge the incident if you are going to be taking ownership of it. 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 it to a different escalation policy (or user) which will restart the notification process for that team.After you acknowledge an incident, you have the option to snooze it to prevent it from notifying you again for a specified period of time. This is useful if the service has an incident acknowledgement timeout, which will re-trigger an incident and begin notifying you again after the specified timeout time has been reached. In addition, you have the option to unacknowledge an incident to return it to a triggered state and restart the notification process.Assess Impact and assign a PriorityOnce the incident has been acknowledged, you need to assess the imp

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PagerDuty Community Team
4 months ago
PagerDuty Community Team
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

450
PagerDuty Community Team
4 months ago
PagerDuty Community Team
PagerDuty Community TeamCommunity Manager
published in PagerDuty User Onboarding
Configuration Guide for Managers and AdminsTutorial

So you’re a Manager for your team and your job is to set up PagerDuty. Wondering where to start? Not to worry - we are here to help!The following action items will guide you through the process of setting up your team. Have more questions? Reach out to us at support@pagerduty.com.Step 1: Set up your user profileVideo: Setting up your User ProfileWalkthrough: Your User ProfileStep 2: Make sure your team has been added to PagerDutyGo to Configuration > Users and search for your team membersIf you don’t see them listed, contact your Account Owner or a Global Admin to have your team members added Step 3: Add your Users to an On-Call ScheduleStep 4: Add your On-Call Schedules to an Escalation PolicyStep 5: Set up Services and IntegrationsWe integrate with over 700 tools - view our Integration GuidesStep 6: Test your ConfigurationGo to Incidents → All Incidents → click +New Incident. Troubleshooting help? Contact support@pagerduty.com 📚LEARN MORE:PagerDuty University FREE on-demand cours

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PagerDuty Community Team
4 months ago
PagerDuty Community Team
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 Team
4 months ago
PagerDuty Community Team
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

280
PagerDuty Community Team
4 months ago
PagerDuty Community Team
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 Team
4 months ago
PagerDuty Community Team
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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PagerDuty Community Team
4 months ago
PagerDuty Community Team
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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PagerDuty Community Team
5 months ago

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