Incidents

What are Incidents?

Incidents are problems that have been triggered on services and need to be solved. The services escalation policy determines who will get notified to fix the issue. 

Useful Links

Incident Lifecycle

  1. Received through Services
  2. Assigned via Escalation Policies and Schedules
  3. Notifications sent via Phone, SMS, Email or Push
  4. Acknowledging and Resolving

Incident Status

In PagerDuty, an incident can have one of three statuses:

Triggered:
  • Occurs when a service triggers an incident, it is sent through the prospective escalation policy, and the on-call user is notified.
Acknowledged:
  • Occurs when an incident is being worked on but is not yet resolved. The on-call user acknowledges the incident and has the time to work on fixing it, during which the escalation policy is halted. No further notifications will be sent until the acknowledgement timeout has been reached (the incident will re-trigger after a certain amount of time to ensure it has not been forgotten. This will notify the user working on the incident, and the new on-call user if shifts have changed)
Resolved:
  • Occurs when an incident has been fixed. No further notifications will be sent and the incident cannot be re-triggered.

Setup and Configuration

Trigger an Incident

There are multiple ways to trigger an incident depending on your situation:

Acknowledge an Incident

There are multiple ways to acknowledge an incident depending on your preferences:

Un acknowledge an Incident

  1. Go to Incidents to view Open Incidents page.
  2. Click on the Title of the incident to open the Incident Details Page
  3. Click on the More… button
  4. Select Unacknowledge Incident
    This will bring the incident back to the triggered state and notifications will be sent out. The escalation process resumes 

Resolve an Incident

There are multiple ways to resolve an incident depending on your preferences:

Usage

Reassign an Incident

There are three ways to reassign an incident:

  1. Reassign to an Escalation Level (Recommended)
    • This will escalate the incident to the next user in the current escalation policy. This means the escalation policy will continue to cycle through escalation rules.
  2. Reassign to an Escalation Policy (Recommended)
    • This will send the incident to a different escalation policy and it will then continue to cycle through the escalation rules
  3. Reassign to a User
    • This will send the incident to a specific user, meaning that user is the only person who will be notified. The incident will no longer cycle through the escalation policy and other users will not be notified if the selected user doesn’t acknowledge the incident.

Reassign an Incident in the Web App

  1.  Go to Incidents
  2. Select the Title of the incident you want to reassign
  3. In the top actions menu, select Reassign
  4. Select the Escalation Poliyc, User or Escalation Level from their respective dropdown menus
  5. Select Reassign

To reassign multiple incidents, go to Incidents and select the checkbox to the left of all incidents you want to reassign. Then select Reassign in the top menu.

Reassign an Incident in the Mobile App

  1. Select the Incident
  2. On the bottom right select More > Reassign
  3. Select where to reassign based on your preferences
    • For a different escalation policy: Go to the Escalation Policies tab and select the Escalation Policy
    • For the next user in the escalation policy: Go to the Users tab and select a user under This Policy
    • For a different user: Go to the Users tab and select a user under All Users

To reassign multiple incidents, go to the Open Incidents screen and select the three dots on the top right > select Select Incidents. Select the Radio buttons next to each incident > select the three dots again > select Reassign. Choose where to reassign the incident and select Reassign. 

Escalate an Incident

This will escalate the incident to another user on the current escalation policy

  • In the Web App:
  1. Go to Incidents and select the Title of your incident
  2. In the top action menu, select Escalate
  3. Select a user from the dropdown
  • In the Mobile App:
  1. Select the incident
  2. Select More on the bottom right > select Escalate
  3. Select a user from the dropdown
  4. Select Escalate

Edit an Incident

There are options to Merge, Snooze and Add Notes to incidents