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.

📘

Availability by Plan

Role Type	Professional	Business	Enterprise
Predefined Roles (Incident Commander, Customer Liaison)	✔️	✔️	✔️
Custom Roles		one	10 (for a total of 12 incident roles)

Contact the Sales Team to upgrade or expand your incident roles feature set.

👍

Incident Response Guide

For more information on how teams at PagerDuty use roles in their incident management process, refer to the Incident Response Guide.

Default Incident Roles

There are two default incident roles:

• Incident Commander
• Customer Liaison

Your account plan determines whether these roles are available. You can enable these roles to use them on incidents. For detailed configuration steps, see Enable or Disable Incident Roles.

Create Incident Roles

🚧

Required User Permissions

Global administrators and the account owner can create, edit, and delete account-wide incident roles.

📘

Note

Your pricing plan determines whether you can create roles. See the Availability by Plan table.

1. Navigate to Incidents Incident Roles.

2. Click New Role.

3. On the New Role screen, complete the following fields and click Create Role:

   Field	Description
   Display Name	A role name to display on incidents.
   Role Name	A unique name for API use. This name can contain only lowercase letters, numbers, and underscores. Note: You cannot change the Role Name after role creation.
   Description	Help responders understand the scope of the role and how they should use it.
   Disable Incident Role	Select Enable or Disable. Disabling a role removes it from future incidents. Existing incident roles and assignees remain unaffected.

Edit Incident Roles

1. Navigate to Incidents Incident Roles.

2. Click the role you want to edit.

3. On the edit screen, modify the details using the following fields and click Save Changes:

   Field	Description
   Display Name	Edit the role name.
   Description	Edit the description to help responders understand the scope of the role and how they should use it.
   Disable Incident Role	Select Enable or Disable depending on your preference. If disabled, the role no longer appears on incidents. Existing incident roles and assignees remain unaffected.

Enable or Disable Incident Roles

To enable or disable an existing incident role:

1. Navigate to Incidents Incident Roles.
2. In the Ellipsis Icon () overflow menu next to the role you want to disable or enable, click Enable or Disable.

Delete Incident Roles

❗️

Deletion Warning

You cannot recover an incident role after deleting it.

1. Navigate to Incidents Incident Roles.
2. In the Ellipsis Icon () overflow menu next to the role you want to delete, click Delete.
3. In the confirmation modal, type Delete in the text box and click Delete.

Assign an Incident Role

Once you create an incident role, you can assign the role to an incident responder.

📘

Behavior When You Assign Roles to Non-Responders

If you assign a role to a user who is not already a responder on the incident, this action adds them as a responder. For more information on managing responders, see Add Responders to an Incident. The responder request includes the role assigned to the user.

You can assign an incident role in multiple ways:

Assign an Incident Role in the Web App

You can assign incident roles to individual users or to escalation policies. When you assign a role to an escalation policy, it sends a responder invite to the on-call responder. Once accepted, PagerDuty assigns them to the role. If they do not accept the responder request before the escalation timeout, PagerDuty escalates and notifies the next level of the escalation policy.

🚧

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.

Follow these steps to assign an incident role:

1. When viewing an incident, in the Responders list on the right, click Assign Roles.

2. In the Assign Roles modal, complete the following field and click Save:

   Field	Value
   [Incident Role Dropdown]	Click the dropdown for your preferred role, select the Escalation Policies or Users tab, and select the desired responder.

Assign or edit roles

Assign an Incident Role in Slack

You can assign incident roles from a PagerDuty incident notification in Slack.

🚧

Requirements

• You must configure the integration via the Slack Integration Guide to assign incident roles in Slack.
• You must have Responder permissions or higher to assign incident roles in Slack.

Follow these steps to assign an incident role in Slack:

1. In a Slack workspace integrated via the Slack Integration Guide, navigate to a PagerDuty incident notification.
2. Click More Actions Assign Roles.
3. In the Assign Roles dialog, click the Select dropdown, select a user, and click Save.

Assign an Incident Role in Microsoft Teams

You can assign an incident role from a PagerDuty incident notification in Microsoft Teams.

🚧

Requirements

• You must configure the integration via the Microsoft Teams Integration Guide to assign incident roles in Teams.
• You must have Responder permissions or higher to assign incident roles in Teams.

Follow these steps to assign an incident role:

1. In a Microsoft Teams chat integrated via the Microsoft Teams Integration Guide, navigate to a PagerDuty incident notification.
2. Click the Ellipsis Icon () overflow menu and select Assign Roles.
3. In the Assign Roles dialog, click the Type to search for a user dropdown, select a user, and click Save.

FAQ