PagerDuty

Overview

Set up PagerDuty for incident management with on-call schedules, escalation policies, and integrations. Covers service creation, Events API for triggering alerts, schedule management, and automation via the REST API.

Instructions

Task A: Create Services and Escalation Policies

# Create an escalation policy
curl -X POST "https://api.pagerduty.com/escalation_policies" \
  -H "Authorization: Token token=${PD_API_KEY}" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "escalation_policy": {
      "name": "Platform Team Escalation",
      "escalation_rules": [
        {
          "escalation_delay_in_minutes": 10,
          "targets": [
            { "id": "P1AB2CD", "type": "schedule_reference" }
          ]
        },
        {
          "escalation_delay_in_minutes": 15,
          "targets": [
            { "id": "PXYZ789", "type": "user_reference" }
          ]
        }
      ],
      "repeat_enabled": true,
      "num_loops": 2
    }
  }'

# Create a service with the escalation policy
curl -X POST "https://api.pagerduty.com/services" \
  -H "Authorization: Token token=${PD_API_KEY}" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "service": {
      "name": "Payment Service - Production",
      "description": "Payment processing microservice",
      "escalation_policy": { "id": "PESCAL1", "type": "escalation_policy_reference" },
      "alert_creation": "create_alerts_and_incidents",
      "auto_resolve_timeout": 14400,
      "acknowledgement_timeout": 1800,
      "alert_grouping_parameters": {
        "type": "intelligent"
      },
      "incident_urgency_rule": {
        "type": "use_support_hours",
        "during_support_hours": { "type": "constant", "urgency": "high" },
        "outside_support_hours": { "type": "constant", "urgency": "low" }
      },
      "support_hours": {
        "type": "fixed_time_per_day",
        "time_zone": "America/New_York",
        "days_of_week": [1, 2, 3, 4, 5],
        "start_time": "08:00:00",
        "end_time": "20:00:00"
      }
    }
  }'

Task B: Send Alerts via Events API

# Trigger an alert
curl -X POST "https://events.pagerduty.com/v2/enqueue" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "routing_key": "<INTEGRATION_KEY>",
    "event_action": "trigger",
    "dedup_key": "payment-service/high-error-rate/prod",
    "payload": {
      "summary": "Payment Service: Error rate exceeded 5% (currently 8.3%)",
      "severity": "critical",
      "source": "prometheus-alertmanager",
      "component": "payment-service",
      "group": "production",
      "class": "error_rate",
      "custom_details": {
        "error_rate": "8.3%",
        "threshold": "5%",
        "affected_endpoints": ["/api/charge", "/api/refund"],
        "runbook": "https://wiki.internal/runbooks/payment-errors"
      }
    },
    "links": [
      { "href": "https://grafana.internal/d/payments", "text": "Grafana Dashboard" }
    ]
  }'

# Acknowledge an alert
curl -X POST "https://events.pagerduty.com/v2/enqueue" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "routing_key": "<INTEGRATION_KEY>",
    "event_action": "acknowledge",
    "dedup_key": "payment-service/high-error-rate/prod"
  }'

# Resolve an alert
curl -X POST "https://events.pagerduty.com/v2/enqueue" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "routing_key": "<INTEGRATION_KEY>",
    "event_action": "resolve",
    "dedup_key": "payment-service/high-error-rate/prod"
  }'

Task C: On-Call Schedules

# Create a weekly rotation schedule
curl -X POST "https://api.pagerduty.com/schedules" \
  -H "Authorization: Token token=${PD_API_KEY}" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "schedule": {
      "name": "Platform Team Primary On-Call",
      "time_zone": "America/New_York",
      "schedule_layers": [
        {
          "name": "Weekly Rotation",
          "start": "2026-02-19T09:00:00-05:00",
          "rotation_virtual_start": "2026-02-19T09:00:00-05:00",
          "rotation_turn_length_seconds": 604800,
          "users": [
            { "user": { "id": "PUSER01", "type": "user_reference" } },
            { "user": { "id": "PUSER02", "type": "user_reference" } },
            { "user": { "id": "PUSER03", "type": "user_reference" } }
          ],
          "restrictions": [
            {
              "type": "daily_restriction",
              "start_time_of_day": "09:00:00",
              "duration_seconds": 57600
            }
          ]
        }
      ]
    }
  }'

# Get who is currently on call
curl -s "https://api.pagerduty.com/oncalls?schedule_ids[]=PSCHED1&earliest=true" \
  -H "Authorization: Token token=${PD_API_KEY}" | \
  jq '.oncalls[] | {user: .user.summary, schedule: .schedule.summary, start: .start, end: .end}'

Task D: Incident Management

# List open incidents
curl -s "https://api.pagerduty.com/incidents?statuses[]=triggered&statuses[]=acknowledged" \
  -H "Authorization: Token token=${PD_API_KEY}" | \
  jq '.incidents[] | {id: .id, title: .title, status: .status, urgency: .urgency, service: .service.summary, created: .created_at}'

# Add a note to an incident
curl -X POST "https://api.pagerduty.com/incidents/${INCIDENT_ID}/notes" \
  -H "Authorization: Token token=${PD_API_KEY}" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "From: oncall@example.com" \
  -d '{
    "note": {
      "content": "Identified root cause: connection pool exhaustion on db-primary. Scaling up connections from 100 to 200."
    }
  }'

Task E: Automation with Event Orchestration

# Create event orchestration rules
curl -X PUT "https://api.pagerduty.com/event_orchestrations/${ORCH_ID}/router" \
  -H "Authorization: Token token=${PD_API_KEY}" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "orchestration_path": {
      "sets": [
        {
          "id": "start",
          "rules": [
            {
              "label": "Route payments alerts",
              "conditions": [
                { "expression": "event.component matches part '\''payment'\'' " }
              ],
              "actions": {
                "route_to": { "service": { "id": "PSVC_PAY", "type": "service_reference" } }
              }
            },
            {
              "label": "Suppress health checks",
              "conditions": [
                { "expression": "event.payload.summary matches part '\''health check'\''" }
              ],
              "actions": { "suppress": true }
            }
          ]
        }
      ],
      "catch_all": {
        "actions": {
          "route_to": { "service": { "id": "PSVC_DEFAULT", "type": "service_reference" } }
        }
      }
    }
  }'

Best Practices

• Use dedup_key to prevent duplicate incidents for the same issue
• Set intelligent alert grouping to automatically correlate related alerts
• Include runbook links and dashboard URLs in alert custom details
• Configure support hours to route low-urgency alerts during business hours only
• Rotate on-call weekly and limit shifts to avoid burnout
• Use event orchestration to suppress noisy alerts and enrich events before routing