How to Set Up PagerDuty Integration for Uptime Alerts

Slack notifications are great for daytime issues. But when your site goes down at 3 AM, you need something that will actually wake someone up. That's where PagerDuty comes in.

PagerDuty manages on-call schedules, escalation policies, and multi-channel alerting. Connected to your uptime monitoring, it ensures the right person responds to every incident — fast.

Why PagerDuty + Uptime Monitoring

The Problem with Basic Alerting

• Email alerts get buried or silenced at night
• Slack notifications are easy to miss on mobile
• SMS might be blocked by Do Not Disturb mode
• No escalation if the first person doesn't respond

What PagerDuty Adds

• On-call scheduling — Automatically routes to whoever is on-call
• Escalation — If no response in 5 minutes, escalate to the next person
• Multi-channel delivery — Push notification, SMS, phone call, email — all at once
• Acknowledgment tracking — Know that someone is working on it
• Incident grouping — Multiple alerts for the same issue become one incident

Step-by-Step Setup

Step 1: Create a PagerDuty Service

1. Log into PagerDuty
2. Go to Services → New Service
3. Name it (e.g., "Website Monitoring")
4. Select your escalation policy
5. Choose "Events API v2" as the integration type
6. Copy the Integration Key

Step 2: Connect to Your Monitoring

1. Go to your monitoring dashboard
2. Navigate to Alert Channels → Add Channel
3. Select PagerDuty
4. Paste the Integration Key
5. Send a test alert to verify the connection

Step 3: Configure Alert Routing

Not every alert should page someone at 3 AM:

• P1 (Site down): PagerDuty + Slack
• P2 (Degraded): Slack + Email
• P3 (Minor): Slack only
• P4 (Info): Email digest

Step 4: Set Up On-Call Schedule

1. Create a schedule in PagerDuty
2. Add team members to the rotation
3. Set rotation frequency (weekly is most common)
4. Add overrides for holidays and time off

Step 5: Configure Escalation

1. Create an escalation policy
2. Level 1: Primary on-call (5-minute timeout)
3. Level 2: Secondary on-call (5-minute timeout)
4. Level 3: Engineering manager (10-minute timeout)
5. Level 4: CTO (final escalation)

Best Practices

Test the Full Chain

Before going live, trigger a real test alert and verify:

• The right person gets notified
• The notification actually arrives (check phone settings)
• Acknowledgment flows back to your monitoring dashboard
• Escalation works if the first person doesn't respond

Use Severity Levels

Map your monitoring alert severities to PagerDuty urgencies:

• Critical monitor alerts → PagerDuty High urgency (phone call)
• Warning alerts → PagerDuty Low urgency (push notification only)

Avoid Alert Storms

Configure PagerDuty's alert grouping so that one outage creates one incident, not fifty. A database failure that takes down 10 services should be one page, not ten.

Review Regularly

• Weekly: Review incidents and response times
• Monthly: Adjust schedules and escalation policies
• Quarterly: Full audit of alert routing and severity mapping

PagerDuty is the bridge between detecting a problem and fixing it. Connected to comprehensive uptime monitoring, it ensures no incident goes unnoticed — day or night.