Incident Roles allow you to customize a set of roles that can be assigned via Slack during an incident. An established set of Incident Roles helps to clearly define incident responsibilities, promotes accountability, and enables efficient response.

For more information on how PagerDuty uses roles in our own major incident management process, see our Incident Response Guide

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Availability

Incident Roles are available with the Enterprise Incident Management package. Please contact our Sales Team to upgrade to an account with Incident Roles.

Create Incident Roles

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Required User Permissions

Global Admins and Account Owners can create, edit and delete account-wide Incident Roles.

1. Navigate to Incidents Incident Roles.
2. Click New Role.
   1. Display Name: Enter a role display name that will appear on incidents.
   2. Role Name: Enter a unique name that will be referred to in the API. This name can only contain lowercase letters, numbers, and underscores.
      1. Note: The Role Name cannot be changed after the role has been created.
   3. Description: Enter a description that will help responders understand the scope of the role and how it should be used.
3. Click Create Role to finish the process.

Edit Incident Roles

1. Navigate to Incidents Incident Roles.
2. On the right side of the role you wish to update, click the menu and select Edit Role.
   1. Display Name: Edit the role display name that will appear on incidents.
   2. Description: Edit the description that will help responders understand the scope of the role and how it should be used.
3. Click Save Changes to finish the process.

Delete Incident Roles

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Deletion Warning

A deleted Incident Role cannot be recovered.

1. Navigate to Incidents Incident Roles.
2. On the right side of the role you wish to update, click the menu and select Delete Role.
3. A confirmation prompt will appear asking if you want to delete the role, as this action cannot be undone. Enter Delete in the text box to and click Delete again to confirm and finish the process.

Assign an Incident Role in Slack

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Requirements

• You must configure the Slack Integration in order to assign Incident Roles in Slack.
• Responder permissions or higher are required to assign Incident Roles in Slack.

Once an Incident Role has been created, you can assign the role to a responder from a PagerDuty incident notification in Slack.

1. In a Slack Workspace with a configured PagerDuty app, navigate to a PagerDuty incident notification.
2. Click More Actions and select Incident Roles.
3. Click Select to view the list of available responders.
4. Select a responder to assign them to the corresponding Incident Role.
5. Click Save Changes to finish the process.

Use Incident Roles in Incident Workflows

After you have created incident roles, you can assign or unassign them as part of an Incident Workflow. This allows you to automate role assignment based on a set of workflow conditions, removing manual work from your Incident Management processes.

Please read Incident Workflows for more information.

FAQ

Can I assign the same Incident Role to multiple responders?

Are Incident Roles available in other parts of PagerDuty, besides Slack and Incident Workflows?