PagerDuty sends notifications to on-call users when an incident is assigned to them. These notifications are most commonly sent when an incident triggers or escalates. Depending on your account’s plan, users may also receive notifications when they’re added as a responder or subscriber, or when a conference bridge is added to an incident. The specific content and behavior of these notifications are detailed below.

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Best Practice

We strongly recommend adding multiple channels for your notification rules. In the event that a 3rd-party SMS or voice carrier has an outage, another channel, such as push, will still be able to notify you.

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Configure Contact Methods and Notification Rules

This article details the content that is included in various PagerDuty notifications. For more information about adding contact methods and configuring notification rules, please see the following sections in the User Profile article:

• Contact Information
• Notification Rules

Notification Content

PagerDuty can send notifications via the following channels:

• Email Notifications
• SMS Notifications
• Phone Notifications
• Push Notifications

Email Notifications

Source: PagerDuty sends email notifications from [email protected].

HTML Email Notifications

Users can choose whether they’d like to receive HTML notifications in their web app user profile:

1. Go to User Icon My Profile Contact Information tab.
2. In the Email section, click to edit your desired email address, or Add Email Address if you would like to add a new one.
3. Check the Send HTML Emails checkbox.
   • If this option is unselected, PagerDuty will send email notifications in plain text.

4. Click Save.

Here is an example of a PagerDuty HTML email notification:

Here is an example of a PagerDuty plain text email notification:

Email Truncation and Attachments

When you receive a PagerDuty email notification, the incident’s Details section will be truncated after 500 characters. You can include clickable links in this truncated message. The rest of the email body is accessible either in the web app on the incident’s details page, or in the mobile app.

PagerDuty removes attachments from email notifications and incident logs. To view the original attachment, please refer to the system that sent the original attachment.

Email Digests

PagerDuty adds a digest to the end of email notification subject lines so that related messages are grouped together in your inbox, for example: [PagerDuty Alert] You have 2 TRIGGERED Incidents (4bc68). This digest is not displayed in the PagerDuty web app, however it will help your email client know that subsequent messages are related to a specific incident.

SMS Notifications

Source: PagerDuty sends SMS notifications from a predefined list of phone numbers.

PagerDuty users opt in and consent to receiving SMS notifications regarding incidents, status updates and on-call shifts by configuring SMS contact methods on their User Profile.

After adding contact methods, users indicate how frequently they'd like to receive notifications, including SMS, by configuring notification rules.

In the course of normal PagerDuty use, users may receive the following SMS notifications related to an incident, status update, or on-call shift. Most users can take action on SMS messages (e.g., acknowledge or resolve an incident) by replying with the numeric code indicated in the message.

PagerDuty SMS notifications are truncated to meet the 160-character limit for text messages. Here is an example of a PagerDuty SMS notification:

If multiple incidents are assigned to you, PagerDuty will bundle all notifications into a single SMS notification, listing out the incident numbers and giving you the option to acknowledge all or resolve all incidents at once.

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SMS Responses

Most users can respond to SMS notifications by enter a context-specific numerical code. Due to regional restrictions, users in some countries may not be able to respond to SMS notifications. If you are in one of these countries, the SMS notifications you receive may differ from the information outlined above. Please refer to Supported Countries for more information.

Call To Action Prompts

Users can get help, opt out of receiving SMS notifications, or opt back in by replying with the following action prompts:

Phone Notifications

Source: Variable numbers from the PagerDuty Vcard.

Please read our Live Call Routing article for more information on how Live Call Routing messages may be formatted.

Push Notifications

Here is an example of a PagerDuty push notification:

Notification Behavior

How PagerDuty bundles multiple notifications together for noise reduction, and how to test and respond to notifications.

Notification Bundling

When a user is assigned to multiple incidents, PagerDuty will bundle notifications into a single summary message in an effort to reduce alert fatigue and distractions. All notification methods (email, SMS, phone and push) support notification bundling. Bundled notifications will include information about all triggered incidents (i.e., not acknowledged or resolved).

The following examples assume a service named “Nagios-Shopping-Cart” has triggered five incidents within the previous minute. Here is what bundled notifications would look like for each notification method:

Email

You are assigned 5 triggered incidents in PagerDuty:
Please visit the following URL to manage these incidents.
https://fake-name.pagerduty.com/dashboard

1) Incident #100
   Opened on: Jan 1 at 12:00pm PST
   Service: Nagios-Shopping-Cart
   Description: Emergency in the server room
   Link: https://fake-service.pagerduty.com/i/100

SMS

ALRT: #100,#101,#102,#103,#104 on Nagios-Shopping-Cart. Reply 14:Ack all, 16:Resolv all

Phone

You have 5 triggered incidents on Nagios-Shopping-Cart. Press 4 to acknowledge all incidents. Press 6 to resolve all incidents. Press 0 for help or press * to repeat this message.

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Minimize Notifications

You can reduce the overall number of notifications that you receive by adding a delay to your notification rules. For example, adding a few-minutes delay will allow more time for incidents to aggregate, and you can expect to receive fewer notifications during periods of high incident volume.

Send Test Notifications

Please see our Test a Contact Method section for more information.

Respond to Incident Notifications

Respond to an SMS Notification

When you receive an SMS incident notification, you will be prompted to Ack, Resolv, or Escal8 it. While the specific code you receive for each action may vary, Ack will always end in 4, Resolv will always end in 6, and Escal8 will always end in 8.

The following example assumes there is an incident on a service named “Signal Sciences”:

Respond to a Phone Notification

Similar to SMS notifications, you can respond to phone notifications to acknowledge, resolve or escalate an incident.

An example phone notification states: PagerDuty Alert: You have one triggered incident on Signal Sciences. The failure is “Check outside normal range - Warning”. Press 4 to acknowledge. Press 6 to resolve. Press 8 to escalate to the level 2 on call, User 2 .

Enter the appropriate number on your phone’s keypad to take one of the following actions:

• Acknowledge
• Resolve
• Escalate
  • This option is available if there is another level in the service’s escalation policy.

Respond from the Mobile App

For more information about taking action on incidents in the mobile app, please see Respond to Incidents in the Mobile App.

Respond to an Email Notification

Responding to an email notification to acknowledge or resolve an incident is not supported. We recommend using one of the following methods to take action on an incident:

• Web app (acknowledge, resolve)
• Mobile app
• SMS notification
• Phone notification