FAQ

Through its SaaS-based platform, PagerDuty empowers developers, DevOps, IT operations and business leaders to prevent and resolve business-impacting incidents for exceptional customer experience. When revenue and brand reputation depends on customer satisfaction, PagerDuty arms organizations with the insight to proactively manage events that may impact customers across their IT environment. With hundreds of native integrations, on-call scheduling & escalations, machine learning, business-wide response orchestration, analytics, and much more, PagerDuty gets the right data in the hands of the right people in real time, every time.

You should consider using PagerDuty if:

• You want to add the ability to customize notification rules for your existing monitoring tools (i.e. text or call me if it's high-urgency, send me a push notification or email if it's low-urgency).
• You want to extend agile incident management workflows to your existing environment with on-call scheduling, automated escalations, incident tracking, and more.
• You want a single place where you can view the overall health of your systems and operations, no matter how many tools, services, or applications your team is managing.

Yes. PagerDuty allows you to group integrations into services that mirror your service-oriented architecture. Each PagerDuty service has its own associated notification and escalation rules (these are called “escalation policies”). This automatically routes issues to the people best able to resolve them. For example, you might want to create an escalation policy for your database administrator team, and use this policy for all services that integrate with database monitoring systems. This ensures that database problems are always forwarded to a database specialist.

PagerDuty can automatically group related alerts into a single incident to minimize noise while centralizing relevant context. Incident notifications are automatically sent using any preferred combination of phone calls, SMS, push notifications and emails. You can customize these notification methods (within the settings for each service), so that incidents dynamically select the right notification behavior depending on their severity, time of day, or during defined support hours.

PagerDuty asks users to confirm that they've received an SMS by replying to it. Similarly, our automated phone calls ask users to make a selection from a voice menu of possible incident options. You can configure PagerDuty to repeat the call or message if a notification isn't replied to.

PagerDuty allows you to specify comprehensive escalation rules. When an incident is triggered, PagerDuty will first try to contact the level-one on-call responder for the incident. If that person doesn't answer within the user-specified escalation timeout (which you can define per your SLA), PagerDuty will automatically escalate to the level-two responder, and so on. You can notify up to 5 users/schedules (50 on Digital Operations and Business plans) in a single escalation rule, and we support up to 20 escalation rules for each escalation policy.

Yes, we support SMS notifications to virtually every country. To learn more about international SMS in PagerDuty and to view the list of supported countries, click here.

Yes, we support phone calls to over 180 countries. To learn more about international calls in PagerDuty and to view the full list of supported countries, click here.

PagerDuty phone notifications can come from varying numbers based on your country and other variables. The best way to ensure that you're receiving a phone notification from PagerDuty is to download the PagerDuty vCard which we keep updated on this page in our Knowledge Base. Some providers automatically change the caller ID, so the number(s) you receive the calls from may be displayed differently. See the following FAQ entry for SMS notifications.

The phone number that will show up on your caller ID for SMS notifications will depend on which SMS provider we use, as well as which country you live in. PagerDuty uses multiple SMS providers per country for availability and redundancy reasons. You can use the below numbers to set up special ringtones on your phone, but please be aware that they might change at any time with little notice. Please also see our vCard for additional numbers.

USA Primary Number: PDUTY (73889), 42752, or 43105

• 281-724-3738
• 206-455-7176
• 206-455-7376
• 206-538-2743
• 206-538-2204
• 415-349-5750
• 682-232-0692
• 682-232-0687
• 657-206-4429
• 657-206-4067
• 682-232-4015
• 682-232-0663
• 682-206-3845
• 754-206-1085
• 754-206-1088
• 754-206-1089
• 415-363-9907
• 415-363-9908
• 415-363-9911
• 415-363-9915
• 415-363-9916
• 415-862-4200
• 415-862-4201

Canada Primary Number: 604-210-6232

• 587-880-2201
• 587-880-2200
• 587-409-6519
• 438-793-9519
• 438-793-9416
• 778-652-4416

United Kingdom: +44 2033 224573

• +44 7860 026813
• +44 7507 333186

Australia: +61 416 906 354

• +61 429 883 475
• +61 419 353 272

Spain: +34 911 067 132

Hungary: +36 70 717 7404

Other European Countries: +44 7860 026813

• +49 177 1781348
• +49 177 1789322
• +46 76-943 60 15
• +33 6 44 63 06 88
• +33 6 44 63 02 68
• +33 6 44 63 99 56
• +33 6 44 63 02 90
• +33 6 44 63 96 79

All Other Countries: Numbers Vary*

Responders can escalate incidents directly from their phone by replying to the SMS or pressing a key during the automated phone call.

No. PagerDuty is a platform for agile incident management, not a monitoring system. Think of PagerDuty as an add-on to trigger the right actions to all the data from your existing monitoring tools. PagerDuty provides sophisticated event management as well as infrastructure health visualizations to identify patterns and trends, but leaves finding problems with your systems to your existing monitoring tools.

Every service you create in PagerDuty has a unique email address, such as nagios-problem@acme.pagerduty.com. PagerDuty opens a new incident and begins the notification process at soon as one of your monitoring tools sends an email to a service's address.

Common monitoring tools used with PagerDuty are Nagios, Pingdom, Amazon Cloudwatch, Splunk and Datadog. However, you can integrate virtually any monitoring tool with PagerDuty via email or API.

PagerDuty can be used to turn any digital signal into real-time action. Here are some possibilities that our customers use us for today:

• Have your applications call you if an unexpected exception is raised.
• Your cron tasks can call you if a critical system maintenance task fails.
• Intrusion detection systems can be set to call you if they detect a security breach.
• Environmental sensors (e.x. temperature, humidity, etc.) can notify you if they detect an unsafe environment.
• Automatically escalate support tickets to ensure response SLA's are met.
• Your marketing team can get notified when traffic spikes in order to opportunistically push a promotion.

PagerDuty uses multiple cloud data centers for redundancy. We also engineer high reliability into other aspects of our system including the use of multiple notification providers.

We advise using an external ping service such as BasicState or Wormly to monitor your network connection and mail server. Of course, you can forward the error messages from these monitoring services to one of your PagerDuty services. This way, if your site loses network connectivity or your mail server crashes, the on-call engineer will be immediately notified by PagerDuty.

You can find our price schedule here. All new PagerDuty accounts come with fully-featured, risk-free 14 day trial (no credit card required). During the free trial, you'll be able to send phone calls and SMSes free of charge. If you decide not to register for a paid plan within the 14 day trial window, your account will expire at the end of the trial.