IT service management (ITSM) tools typically excel at ticketing-related workflows and are used to create and track all customer and service-desk-reported incidents. This being said, ITSM tools don’t usually have effective response capabilities, particularly for critical-impact incidents requiring urgent response. In cases where ITSM systems are used with monitoring tools, it often creates a “swivel-chair” workflow: when a user working with a monitoring tool determines that an incident is occurring, they switch applications and manually create a ticket in the ITSM system. This workflow is cumbersome, error-prone, and provides no direct linkage between operational data and ITSM tickets.

Because of this, PagerDuty’s extensive incident response capabilities are commonly used to augment an ITSM tool deployment and improve this workflow. In this configuration, certain incidents in the ITSM tool are sent to PagerDuty, at which point you can use PagerDuty’s coordinated response and stakeholder communication features.

Benefits

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Availability

Some of the features listed below are only available with our PagerDuty AIOps add-on, or with Legacy Event Intelligence. If you would like to sign up for a trial of PagerDuty AIOps features, please read PagerDuty AIOps Trials.

When you use an integration, you can link PagerDuty incidents and ITSM tickets, and updates to the PagerDuty incident will reflect in the ITSM ticket. This is beneficial in many ways:

• Incident response orchestration: Any incident that requires attention will be automatically assigned to and notify the appropriate responder according to scheduled on-call rotations. PagerDuty also has response mobilization, stakeholder communication, and other response orchestration capabilities, all of which you can leverage directly from the PagerDuty incident.
• Data linkage: For review and reporting purposes, the ITSM ticket is linked to the PagerDuty incident, which in turn is linked to the underlying monitoring tool alerts. This linkage makes post-incident analysis, including postmortems, much more efficient.
• Auto-resolution: If the monitoring tool detects that the underlying issue has recovered, the corresponding PagerDuty incident will receive this update, resolve itself, and then reflect that resolution to the ITSM ticket.
• Streamlined creation: The right tickets are created in the ITSM system, rather than too many (if monitoring tool alerts are fed directly in) or too few (if manual ticket creation is the norm).

PagerDuty offers multiple features to manage event processing and incident creation:

• Deduplicate multiple events from your monitoring tool into a single incident.
• Define Event Orchestration rules to route events and apply specific actions such as suppressing alerts or setting a priority automatically.
• Reduce noise with various alert grouping options.

Requirements

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Pricing Plans

• Ticketing integrations: Jira Cloud and Jira Server are available on the following pricing plans: Professional, Team (legacy), Business, Digital Operations (legacy) and Enterprise for Incident Management.
• Advanced ITSM integrations: ServiceNow and Cherwell are available on the following pricing plans: Business, Digital Operations (legacy) and Enterprise for Incident Management.

Please contact our Sales Team if you would like to upgrade to a plan featuring the above integrations.

Configure PagerDuty

Before you can integrate your system, ensure you’ve done the following within your PagerDuty account:

• Create a schedule to ensure the right people are notified at the right moment.
• Create an escalation policy that uses your desired schedule(s) or users.
• Create a service. This is where the integration will send events to create incidents.
  • Depending on the tool you use, you may have the option to create a service during the integration configuration instead. For example, if you are using ServiceNow, you can also provision configuration items or assignment groups as PagerDuty services using the integration.

Configure Your Integration

Many of the ITSM tool integrations synchronize bidirectionally with PagerDuty, updating the originating ITSM ticket with information on escalations, re-assignments, priority changes, state changes, and notes. PagerDuty integrates with a number of ITSM tools, including:

• ServiceNow
• Jira Cloud
• Jira Server
• Cherwell

You can find additional guides in our Integrations Library. Follow the relevant integration guide to connect your tool to PagerDuty. Once the monitoring tool is integrated, events will be sent to PagerDuty where you can route them to services and create an incident, apply event rules, filter out if appropriate, and much more.