PagerDuty.
You’ve probably heard it mentioned during outages or seen it in tech forums. Maybe your DevOps team talks about it, or you found it while looking for ways to handle system failures.
So, what is PagerDuty exactly? And why do teams rely on it?
This post breaks down PagerDuty in simple terms, explores its key features and benefits, and shows you how to get started.
We’ll also introduce you to a PagerDuty alternative that might work better for your team’s needs.
Let’s dive in!
What is PagerDuty?
PagerDuty is a cloud-based incident management platform. It helps teams respond to incidents quickly.
SREs, DevOps, IT teams, and business leaders rely on PagerDuty to keep their services up and running.
With PagerDuty, you can get real-time alerts, manage on-call schedules, and automate parts of your incident response process.
At its core, PagerDuty solves a critical problem: reducing downtime. It does this by making incident response faster and more organized. This means less impact on users and revenue.
Key Features of PagerDuty
PagerDuty offers several features to help teams manage incidents effectively. Let’s take a look at some of them.
1. Incident Response
Incident response is PagerDuty’s core feature. It helps teams track and manage incidents from detection to resolution.
When something breaks, PagerDuty creates an incident record with all the details. Teams can then update the status, add notes, and track resolution progress.
For example, if your payment gateway crashes, PagerDuty creates an incident, alerts the payment systems team, and provides a central place to coordinate their response.
2. Alerting
The alerting system makes sure the right people know when incidents happen.
PagerDuty sends alerts through multiple channels—phone calls, SMS, email, or push notifications. It also allows you to set rules for alert escalation if someone doesn’t respond.
For instance, if a database server crashes at 2 AM, PagerDuty will call the on-call database admin. If they don’t answer, it automatically contacts the backup responder.
3. On-Call Management
On-call management helps teams share the responsibility of responding to incidents.
With PagerDuty, you can create balanced on-call schedules and rotations so there’s always someone available to respond to incidents.
A team might set up a weekly rotation where each engineer takes turns being on-call. And PagerDuty automatically routes alerts to whoever is on-call.
4. Automation
Automating routine tasks helps teams respond faster to incidents.
PagerDuty can run diagnostic scripts, restart services, or gather information automatically when specific alerts happen. This saves valuable time during incidents.
For example, when a CPU alert triggers, PagerDuty could automatically collect CPU usage logs and restart the affected service before even alerting the team.
Benefits of PagerDuty
PagerDuty offers several benefits to teams handling incidents. Here are a few:
- Faster incident response: When something breaks, PagerDuty alerts the right people at the right time. This way, teams can resolve incidents faster and lower MTTR.
- Reduced alert fatigue: PagerDuty filters out noisy, non-critical alerts. This allows teams to focus on what truly matters instead of drowning in a sea of alerts.
- Better team collaboration: PagerDuty connects teams through Slack, Microsoft Teams, and other tools. This means everyone stays informed and can work together to fix issues faster.
- Improved work-life balance: With PagerDuty, teams can share on-call duties fairly, swap shifts when needed, and set up backup responders. This helps prevent burnout and supports team well-being.
Getting Started With PagerDuty
PagerDuty setup can be overwhelming with its numerous features. However, you can get started with these 3 steps.
Step 1: Set Up Services
Services in PagerDuty represent the systems or applications you want to monitor.
To create your first service:
- Go to the Services section and click + New Service
- Give it a clear, descriptive name
- Add a brief explanation of what this service does
- Choose basic incident settings to keep things simple
Make sure you use consistent naming for your services. This helps team members quickly identify affected systems during incidents.
Step 2: Connect Your Monitoring Tools
Next, connect PagerDuty to the tools that monitor your systems.
Here’s how:
- Open your service and select the Integrations tab
- Choose your monitoring tool (like Datadog, Prometheus, or CloudWatch)
- Copy the integration key or URL provided
- Add this key to your monitoring tool’s configuration
- Send a test alert to make sure it works
This creates a two-way connection that opens incidents when problems occur and closes them when issues are fixed.
Step 3: Create Basic Escalation Policies
Escalation policies determine who gets notified when incidents happen.
To set up your first escalation policy:
- Navigate to People → Escalation Policies
- Click New Escalation Policy
- Name it clearly (like “Backend Team Escalation”)
- Add your primary responders
- Set how long to wait before escalating (15 minutes is recommended)
- Add backup responders as a second level
With these three steps complete, your team has the essential PagerDuty setup needed to start handling incidents effectively.
If you’d like to know how to create on-call schedules, alert rules, status pages, and more advanced features, check out our detailed blog post: PagerDuty Setup: From Beginner to Pro in 10 Steps.
Spike: A Better Alternative to PagerDuty
Spike is an incident response platform that focuses on simplicity and user experience. With over 15 million incidents processed and 750,000+ alerts delivered, it’s an ideal choice for teams of all sizes.
Here’s why Spike stands out as a better alternative to PagerDuty:
- Quick setup: While PagerDuty needs extensive configuration, Spike gets you started in under 5 minutes. Plus, you get ready-to-use templates for creating escalation policies, on-call schedules, and alert rules.
- Simplified user experience: Spike combines beginner-friendly design with powerful controls in a clean interface. One-click actions let your team acknowledge alerts, update status pages, or join war rooms.
- Affordable pricing: Spike offers all essential features in its base plans starting at $6.4/user/month. PagerDuty’s base plan starts at $21/user/month, but charges extra for status pages ($89/month) and other add-ons.
You can save 85% cost by choosing Spike over PagerDuty. Find the detailed pricing breakdown here.
- Better team wellbeing: Spike protects your team’s work-life balance with features like cooldown, deep work, out-of-office modes, and alert suppression. Plus, these wellbeing-focused features come standard, not as premium add-ons.
Hear what Mohammad Hani, Head of Engineering at Thndr, says about Spike
Spike delivers the incident management capabilities you need without the complexity and high costs of PagerDuty. It’s both powerful and simple to use.
FAQs
Is PagerDuty a monitoring tool?
No, PagerDuty is not a monitoring tool. It’s an incident management platform that receives alerts from your monitoring tools. While monitoring tools detect problems, PagerDuty handles what happens next—getting those alerts to the right people and helping teams respond.
What is the difference between PagerDuty and ServiceNow?
PagerDuty focuses specifically on incident response and on-call management. ServiceNow is a broader IT service management platform that covers many areas like asset management, service desks, and IT operations.
What are PagerDuty alternatives?
There are several strong alternatives to PagerDuty: Spike, Atlassian OpsGenie, Incident.io, Datadog Oncall, xMatters, and Splunk Oncall. Each tool offers different strengths. For a full comparison, check out this guide to PagerDuty alternatives.