Incident Roles allow you to customize a set of roles that you can assign during an incident. An established set of Incident Roles clearly defines 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 and enter the following:
   1. Display Name: A role display name that will appear on incidents.
   2. Role Name: A unique name that will be referred to in the API. This name can only contain lowercase letters, numbers, and underscores.
      1. Note: You cannot change the Role Name after role creation.
   3. Description: A description that will help responders understand the scope of the role and how they should use it.
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 edit, 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

We cannot recover an Incident Role once deleted.

1. Navigate to Incidents Incident Roles.
2. On the right side of the role you wish to delete, 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 the Web App

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Requirements

• A user who can take action on the incident (Responder permissions or higher) can assign Incident Roles in the web app.
• You cannot assign roles to Stakeholders.

Once you've created an Incident Role, you can assign the role to an incident responder. When viewing the incident:

1. In the Responders list on the right, click Assign Roles.
2. Select the dropdown for the role you would like to assign to view the list of available responders.
3. Select a responder to assign them to the corresponding Incident Role
4. Click Save to finish the process.

If the selected user was not already a responder on the incident, this action will add them as a responder. The responder request will include the role assigned to the user.

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.

You can assign an Incident Role 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 Assign 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 to finish the process.

Assign an Incident Role in Microsoft Teams

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Requirements

• You must configure the Microsoft Teams Integration in order to assign Incident Roles in Teams.
• You must have Responder permissions or higher to assign Incident Roles in Teams.

You can assign an Incident Role from a PagerDuty incident notification in Microsoft Teams:

1. In a Microsoft Team with a configured PagerDuty app, navigate to a PagerDuty incident notification.
2. Click the overflow menu and select Assign Roles.
3. Click Type to search for a user and begin typing to select a responder.
4. Select a responder to assign them to the corresponding Incident Role.
5. Click Save 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 assignments based on a set of workflow conditions, removing manual work from your Incident Management processes.

Please read Incident Workflows for more information.

Assign an Incident Role to an Escalation Policy

In addition to users, you can assign Incident Roles to an escalation policy. The escalation policy will send a responder invite to the on-call responder. Once accepted, PagerDuty will assign them to the role. If they do not accept the responder request before the escalation timeout, it will escalate to and notify the next level of the escalation policy.

FAQ

Can I assign the same Incident Role to multiple responders?

Can I assign multiple roles to one user?

Where are Incident Roles available in PagerDuty?