What is PagerDuty?
PagerDuty is an incident management and on-call platform for engineering and operations teams. It is made by PagerDuty and routes alerts from monitoring tools to the right responder, then supports escalation, collaboration and post-incident review. The problem it solves is alert chaos: teams get one place to define on-call schedules, deduplicate noisy alerts and coordinate a response when something breaks.
Key features
- On-call scheduling. Teams create rotations, overrides and escalation policies so the right person is notified at each step.
- Alert routing and deduplication. Events from monitoring, cloud and security tools are grouped and routed to the correct service.
- Incident response. Incidents can be acknowledged, escalated and resolved from the web, mobile or chat, with timelines and responder roles.
- Status pages and stakeholder updates. Internal and external status pages keep users and executives informed during an incident.
- Post-incident reviews. Teams capture timelines, follow-up actions and lessons after an incident.
- AI and automation. PagerDuty Advance and AI agents summarize incidents, suggest remediation and automate workflows.
- Integrations. More than 750 integrations connect monitoring, ticketing, chat and cloud tools.
Who is PagerDuty for?
SRE, DevOps, platform and operations teams that run production systems and need reliable on-call coverage. It suits companies with multiple services and monitoring tools, teams that need escalation and status communication, and organisations that want incident analytics and post-incident reviews. Smaller teams can start with the free plan, while larger enterprises can use the reliability platform with AI actions and governance.
Use cases
- Routing production alerts to the on-call engineer.
- Coordinating a major incident across engineering, support and leadership.
- Publishing a public status page during an outage.
- Running post-incident reviews with assigned follow-up actions.
- Automating diagnostics and remediation from an incident workflow.
Pricing
PagerDuty Incident Management has a Free plan at $0 with five users, one on-call schedule, one escalation policy and limited notifications. Professional costs $21 per user per month billed annually, or $25 monthly, and adds post-incident reviews and a fuller chat experience. The PD Reliability Platform starts at $2,800 per year for Starter with 10 seats and 1,000 AI actions, $12,000 per year for Essential and $48,000 per year for Plus, with Ultimate priced custom. See the official PagerDuty pricing page.
Getting started
- Create a PagerDuty account and choose a plan.
- Add users, teams and an on-call schedule.
- Create a service and connect a monitoring integration.
- Send a test alert, acknowledge it and review the incident timeline.
Alternatives
- Better Stack combines uptime monitoring, logs and incident management.
- UptimeRobot monitors uptime and sends alerts.
- Statuspage publishes service status and incident updates.
- Datadog includes incident response alongside observability.
FAQ
Is PagerDuty free?
Yes. The Incident Management Free plan costs $0 and includes five users, one on-call schedule and one escalation policy. Paid plans start at $21 per user per month billed annually.
What is PagerDuty used for?
PagerDuty is used for on-call scheduling, alert routing and incident response. It notifies the right responders, supports escalation and helps teams review incidents afterward.
PagerDuty vs Opsgenie?
Both provide on-call scheduling and incident alerting. PagerDuty offers its own reliability platform with AI actions and analytics, while Opsgenie is part of Atlassian's ecosystem. The choice often depends on existing monitoring and ticketing tools.
Does PagerDuty support Slack?
Yes. PagerDuty integrates with Slack and Microsoft Teams so teams can acknowledge, escalate and collaborate on incidents from chat.
Can PagerDuty publish status pages?
Yes. PagerDuty offers internal and external status pages, with subscriber limits that vary by plan.
