What it does
PagerDuty Incident Management handles alert routing and responder coordination around technical services. Monitoring tools send events to a service integration; PagerDuty creates incidents and follows the service's escalation policy to notify responders in order until someone acknowledges. It is the response layer rather than the telemetry collector: teams still need a monitor or other integration to detect the original problem.
Connect an existing monitor
PagerDuty's docs describe creating a technical service in the web app, naming the team-owned component, then selecting an integration to receive events from monitoring or ITSM tools. After the service is created, follow that integration's guide and use its integration key to configure the sender. A service can also be connected to an escalation policy and an on-call schedule so the right responder receives an incident notification.
For example, a hypothetical alert from a monitoring system about elevated API errors could be sent to an API service in PagerDuty. The policy could notify the primary on-call person first and move to the next level if the incident is not acknowledged before its timeout. Once a responder acknowledges, escalation stops. PagerDuty records and coordinates the incident; the monitoring system remains responsible for detecting the error and diagnostic telemetry is still needed to find its cause.
Check the scale of the free tier
The Incident Management free tier lists five users, one on-call schedule, and one escalation policy. Paid plans expand team and response features. The number of seats and escalation depth matter when comparing plans, so this guide omits a per-user price rather than treating a displayed price as universal. PagerDuty is most useful after alerts already exist and a team needs a repeatable handoff instead of relying on one inbox or an informal rotation.
Strengths
- Ordered escalation rules notify successive responders until someone acknowledges an incident.
- Services can receive events from external monitoring integrations and group those events around a team-owned component.
- On-call schedules and service-level policies support a defined response path.
Watch out for
- PagerDuty does not collect the metrics, logs, or traces that detect and diagnose an issue; it depends on external monitoring or event sources.
- The free Incident Management tier is limited to five users, one on-call schedule, and one escalation policy.
Best for
- Teams that already monitor their applications and need on-call routing for operational alerts
- Services that need a documented escalation path when the first responder is unavailable
Sources
- Trial Account Onboarding | PagerDuty Docs (Oct 26, 2026)
- Escalation Policy Basics | PagerDuty Docs (Oct 26, 2026)
- Plans & Pricing | PagerDuty (Oct 26, 2026)
- Services and Integrations | PagerDuty Docs (Oct 26, 2026)