ITSM tools excel at ticketing workflows and are used to create and track customer and service-desk-reported incidents. However, ITSM tools do not usually have effective response capabilities for critical-impact incidents requiring urgent response. In cases where ITSM systems are used alongside monitoring tools, this 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.

PagerDuty's response orchestration 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, where you can use PagerDuty's coordinated response and stakeholder communication features.

Benefits

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Availability
Some features listed below are only available with the PagerDuty AIOps add-on or with Legacy Event Intelligence. To sign up for a trial of PagerDuty AIOps features, read PagerDuty AIOps Trials.

When you use an integration, you can link PagerDuty incidents and ITSM tickets. Updates to the PagerDuty incident reflect in the ITSM ticket. This provides several benefits:

Response orchestration: Any incident that requires attention is automatically assigned to and notifies the appropriate responder according to scheduled on-call rotations. PagerDuty also provides response mobilization, stakeholder communication, and other response orchestration capabilities, all accessible directly from the PagerDuty incident.
Data linkage: For review and reporting purposes, the ITSM ticket is linked to the PagerDuty incident, which is linked to the underlying monitoring tool alerts. This linkage makes post-incident analysis, including post-incident reviews, more efficient.
Auto-resolution: If the monitoring tool detects that the underlying issue has recovered, the corresponding PagerDuty incident resolves itself and reflects 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 Professional, Team (legacy), Business, Digital Operations (legacy), and Enterprise for Incident Management plans.

Advanced ITSM integrations: ServiceNow is available on the Business, Digital Operations (legacy), and Enterprise for Incident Management plans.

Contact our Sales team to upgrade to a plan that includes these integrations.

Configure PagerDuty

Before integrating your system, complete the following in your PagerDuty account:

Create a schedule to ensure the right people are notified at the right time.
Create an escalation policy that uses your desired schedule(s) or users.
Create a service 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 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 ITSM tool integrations synchronize bidirectionally with PagerDuty, updating the originating ITSM ticket with information on escalations, reassignments, priority changes, state changes, and notes. PagerDuty integrates with a number of ITSM tools, including:

Additional guides are available in the Integrations Library. Follow the relevant integration guide to connect your tool to PagerDuty. Once integrated, events are sent to PagerDuty where you can route them to services, create incidents, apply event rules, filter events, and more.