Service settings allow you to customize what actions you would like to be performed when an incident is triggered. Service settings address incident assignment and notifications, noise reduction, coordinating with stakeholders, event rules and remediation resources. By configuring these settings, you can optimize each incident to address your team’s specific needs.

🚧

Required User Permissions

Users with the following roles can edit services:

• User
• Admin
• Manager base roles and team roles
  • Manager team roles can only manage services associated with their team.
• Global Admin base roles
• Account Owner

Assign to Escalation Policy

Every service in PagerDuty is associated with an escalation policy. You can assign a different escalation policy to a service with these steps:

1. Go to Services Service Directory and select the service you wish to edit.
2. Select the Settings tab and click Edit to the right of Assign and Notify.
3. In the Assign to escalation policy dropdown, select an escalation policy.
4. Click Save Changes.

Notification Urgency

PagerDuty uses the concept of urgency to allow you to customize how your team is notified based on how critical an incident is. Incidents can be either high-urgency (requires immediate attention) or low-urgency (it can wait).

As an incident responder, this means you can set up notification rules so that you won't be woken up for low-urgency incidents that can be handled in the morning, or you can set a service to notify you with only high-urgency or low-urgency notification methods at specific times of day.

🚧

Low-Urgency Incident Escalation

Low-urgency incidents will not be automatically moved through the assigned escalation policy if no one acknowledges it. Low-urgency incidents also cannot be manually escalated, only re-assigned. If you need to escalate a low-urgency incident according to the escalation policy on that service, you will need to change it to high-urgency first.

There are two steps that go into effectively using Urgencies:

• Step One: Configure Urgencies on a Service
• Step Two: Configure User Profiles

Step One: Configure Urgencies on a Service

Urgencies are defined at the service level, and all services initially default to High-urgency notifications, escalate as needed.

To adjust a service’s urgency:

1. Go to Services Service Directory and select the service to edit.
2. Select the Settings tab and click Edit to the right of Assign and Notify.
3. Under How should responders be notified?, select one of the following options (depending on your account’s pricing plan, some of these option may not be available):
   • High-urgency notifications, escalate as needed
   • Low-urgency notifications, do not escalate
   • Dynamic notifications based on alert severity
   • Based on support hours: Once selected, select the days of the week and the hours and time zone for your support hours. Next, under During support hours, use, select what type of notification urgency you would like during support hours. Under Outside support hours, use, select what type of notification urgency you would like outside of support hours. You may also optionally choose to check the box next to Raise urgency of unacknowledged incidents to high when support hours start.
4. Click Save Changes.

📘

Note

If an incident's urgency is set either in the web/mobile app or through the REST API when an incident is triggered, then that set urgency level will override whatever urgency setting is set on that service.

Step Two: Configure User Profiles

After you’ve configured urgency on a service, responders will specify their notification urgency preferences on their user profile.

We recommend creating several tiers of “noisy” notification rules for high-urgency incidents so that on-call responders are notified numerous times until they acknowledge the incident.

For low-urgency incidents, however, an on-call responder may want to receive “quieter” notifications, like a push notification or email, or even no notification at all.

For more information, see Configure Notification Rules.

Urgency Use Case: Support Hours

Let's take a support team as an example. Since a support team responds to customer inquiries during business hours, we may want incidents to be categorized as critical during business hours and non-critical after hours.

The following options are available both During support hours and Outside support hours:

1. High-urgency notifications, escalate as needed
2. Low-urgency notifications, do not escalate
3. Dynamic notifications based on alert severity

Beneath your support hours there is an option When support hours start, raise urgency of unacknowledged incidents to high. With this feature enabled, all open incidents on the service will become high-urgency when your support hours begin, and responders will receive notifications based on their high-urgency notification rules. Notifications will continue until a responder acknowledges or resolves the incident.

This setting is useful for teams who rely on support hours to give their people a rest during off-hours, but want to make sure that any incidents that trigger outside of business hours will be promptly handled once business hours begin again. Please note that the From and to times are for each day. If there are two (or more) continuous days selected, then the start and end times apply to each day separately.

🚧

Manually Triggered Incidents

When manually triggering an incident in the web app, it is possible to make an urgency selection that overrides the service's support hours settings.

Edit Urgency

If an open incident's urgency has been reassessed, responders can edit its urgency in the web or mobile app. Please read Edit Incident Urgency for more information.

Acknowledgement Timeout

The purpose of incident acknowledgement timeouts is to ensure that an acknowledged incident is not forgotten. This feature is turned off by default.

With this feature enabled, an acknowledged incident will re-trigger after a specified amount of time. When the incident re-triggers, it re-notifies assigned responders and, if on-call responsibilities have rotated, the current on-call user, too.

You can configure the timeout’s length, or turn it off completely, on service’s settings page:

1. Go to Services Service Directory and select the service you wish to edit.
2. Select the Settings tab and click Edit next to Assign and Notify.
3. Select Re-trigger acknowledged incidents after [TIME] and re-notify assigned responders and select the timeout period from the dropdown.
4. Click Save Changes.

If you need to set the timeout to a value that is not offered in the web app, you may also adjust it using the REST API.

📘

Snooze an Incident

If you need to quiet an individual incident for a different length of time than the service's incident ack timeout, you can snooze the incident instead.

Auto-Resolution

If you would like an incident to automatically resolve after a given amount of time, you can set a service to auto-resolve incidents. By default, this feature is not turned on.

Auto-resolution is recommended for services that are expected to produce a high number of active incidents, or for monitoring systems that send trigger events but not resolve events (as with some e-mail-based monitoring systems).

This feature can be useful when there are a large number of active incidents on a service (such as in a CentralOps/NOC environment), because if an incident is not resolved automatically by a monitoring system or manually by a user, responders may not be aware of any recurrences of the issue.

With this feature enabled, an incident automatically resolves after the specified time has passed, and no further notifications will be sent for the incident. Once an incident is resolved it cannot be reopened. If further work is required, a new incident would need to be triggered manually.

Note that an incident contributes to the auto-resolution timer as long as it’s in a triggered or acknowledged state. Snoozed incidents will reset the auto-resolution timer.

Also please note that enabling this feature will only affect incidents that are created after the fact and will not retroactively resolve incidents that are currently open.

📘

High Open Incident Volume

For services with over 100K open incidents, we will automatically enable and require to have the auto-resolve feature enabled. When this feature is enabled, all new incidents for that particular service will be auto-resolved after they have been open for 24 hours, and no further notifications will be sent for those incidents.

It will not be possible to disable this feature for the service in question unless the service's open incident count is reduced to under 100K. To reduce the open incident count, we recommend using the update an incident API to bulk resolve incidents. Additionally, you can use this script for an automated way to bulk resolve incidents.

Configure Auto-Resolution

1. Go to Services Service Directory and select your preferred service.
2. Select the Settings tab and click Edit next to Assign and Notify.
3. Mark the checkbox Resolve open incidents after [TIME] and select a time period from the dropdown.
4. Click Save Changes.

If you need to set this to a time period that is not available in the web app, you can do so with our REST API.

Turn Off Auto-Resolution

1. Go to Services Service Directory and select your preferred service.
2. Select the Settings tab and click Edit next to Assign and Notify.
3. Unmark the checkbox Resolve open incidents after [TIME].
4. Click Save Changes.

Alert Grouping

Alert Grouping allows you to configure a service to group alerts in a variety of ways, thereby reducing noise and accelerating teams’ responses.

📘

Pricing Plan

Alert Grouping is available with our PagerDuty AIOps add-on. The feature is also available for the duration of an AIOps trial. Please contact our Sales Team to upgrade to a pricing plan with this feature.

To configure a service’s Alert Grouping behavior:

1. Go to Services Service Directory and select your preferred service.
2. Select the Settings tab and click New Grouping or Edit in the section Reduce Noise.
3. Select one of the following options:
   • Intelligent
   • Alert Content
   • Time only
4. Click Save Settings.

Read more about each Alert Grouping option:

• Intelligent Alert Grouping
• Content Based Alert Grouping
• Global Alert Grouping
• Time Based Alert Grouping

Auto-Pause Incident Notifications

Automatically pause notifications for transient alerts, giving time for them to resolve before distracting responders.

📘

Pricing Plan

This feature is available as part of the following pricing plans: Digital Operations (legacy) and Enterprise Incident for Management, or it can be purchased via the Event Intelligence add-on. If you would like to sign up for a trial of this and other Event Intelligence features, please contact our Sales team.

To configure Auto-Pause Incident Notifications on a service:

1. Go to Services Service Directory and select your preferred service.
2. Select the Settings tab and click Edit next to Reduce Noise.
3. In the section Transient Alerts, select Auto-pause incident notifications and make a selection from the dropdown:
   • 2 minutes
   • 3 minutes
   • 5 minutes
   • 10 minutes
   • 15 minutes
4. Click Save Changes.

For more detailed information about this feature, please see Auto-Pause Incident Notifications.

Add a Conference Bridge

You can configure a service to include a conference bridges on every incident. PagerDuty supports dial-in numbers and meeting URLs.

1. Go to Services Service Directory and select your preferred service.
2. Select the Settings tab and click Edit next to Coordinate Responders and Stakeholders.
3. In the fields Conference Bridge Dial-In Number and Conference Bridge Meeting URL, enter your conference bridge information.
4. Click Save Changes.

Add an Incident Workflow to a Service

You can configure a service to run an Incident Workflow when an incident triggers and conditions are met.

1. Navigate to Services Service Directory and select your preferred service.
2. Select the Workflows tab and click Associate Workflow.
3. Follow the steps in the Incident Workflow guide to create or edit a workflow.

Remove an Incident Workflow from a Service

If you’d like to remove an Incident Workflow from a service:

1. Navigate to Services Service Directory and select your preferred service.
2. Select the Workflows tab and click on the 3 dots next to the workflow you want to remove.
3. Click Open in builder and remove the association with the service.

Event Rules

Event Rules can be configured at two different levels: at the service level and at a global level. For more information, see our article on Event Orchestration.

Documentation Link

You can add a link to documentation that includes routine procedures or troubleshooting steps for a service so that it can be easily referenced during an incident.

1. Navigate to Services Service Directory and select your preferred service.
2. Select the Settings tab, scroll to the section Remediate, and click Edit.
3. In the field Documentation link enter the full path of the link to your documentation.
4. In the field Documentation link name, enter a user-friendly description.
5. Click Save Changes.

Once configured, responders can view the documentation link in the same section on a service's details page under Settings Remediate.

Delete a Documentation Link

1. Navigate to Services Service Directory and select your preferred service.
2. Select the Settings tab and click Edit to the right of Remediate.
3. Click Remove Documentation.

Custom Incident Actions

Custom incident actions provide responders with a quick way to execute custom logic housed outside of the PagerDuty system. For more information, please refer to Custom Incident Actions.