Pagerduty Training

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What this covers

This training material will cover the following topics:

Pagerduty user management
Pagerduty rotations (adding/editing)
adding and removing users from a rotation

Pagerduty user management

To manage users in Pagerduty, you will first need to go to the Users page. You can get there by clicking on People at the top of the page and then selecting Users in the sub-menu that appears.

Creating users in Pagerduty

From the Users page, click the blue Add Users button in the top-right of the page. You will then enter the new user's full name, email address, and select a role (User for most, Admin for Support Operations team members). After doing so, click the blue Add button to have an invite sent out to that person.

Editing users in Pagerduty

From the Users page, locate the user you wish to edit and click on their name (far left column). After doing so, locate the settings you wish to change (role is the most common, which is under User Settings). Click the box with a pencil in it icon, make the changes, and click the blue Save button.

Deleting users in Pagerduty

From the Users page, locate the user you wish to edit and click the Delete link on their row (far right column). Doing so will have a Javascript confirmation box appear asking you to confirm the deletion. Click the OK button to confirm the deletion.

Pagerduty schedules

When working with pagerduty schedules, keep the following diagram in mind:

One to many relationship:

graph TD; A["Escalation Policy"] --> B["Schedule"]; A["Escalation Policy"] --> C["Schedule"]; A["Escalation Policy"] --> D["Schedule"]; E["Escalation Policy"] --> F["Schedule"]; E["Escalation Policy"] --> G["Schedule"]; E["Escalation Policy"] --> H["Schedule"]; I["Escalation Policy"] --> J["Schedule"]; I["Escalation Policy"] --> K["Schedule"]; I["Escalation Policy"] --> L["Schedule"];

This helps illustrate that for a schedule to work properly, it must be within a escalation policy. A bit of a catch-22 is the escalation policy normally needs a schedule or list of users to use in the targets, so you normally have to either use an existing escalation policy or create the schedule first and then create the escalation policy.

This can be tedious, so the general workflow we recommend is:

graph TD; A --> B; B --> C; C --> D; A["Create escalation policy"]; B["Have it use your user for the notification target"]; C["Create the schedule"]; D["Edit the escalation policy to use the schedule instead of your user"];

Creating an escalation policy

To create an escalation policy, you will first need to go to the Escalation Policies page. You can locate this by clicking People at the top of the page and then clicking Escalation Policies on the sub-menu that appears.

From there, click the blue + New Escalation Policiy button. You will then give the escalation policy a name and description.

In the Notify the following users or schedules section, click the textbox and select your user for the time being. You will later replace this with the schedule or set of users you wish to utilize.

After doing so, click the blue Save button to finish creating the escalation policy.

Editing an escalation policy

From there, locate the escalation policy you wish to edit and click on the name. You will then click the white button on the top-right that reads Edit Escalation Policy.

From here, you can change the name, description, and escalation rules. After you have done so, click the blue Save button.

Creating a schedule

To create a schedule, you will first need to go to the Schedules page. You can locate this by clicking People at the top of the page and then clicking On-Call Schedules on the sub-menu that appears.

From there, click the blue + New On-Call Schedule button at the top-right of the page. On this page, you will give your schedule a name, description, timezone to use, and layers to use (this contains the list of users and times to use). Once you are done, review the preview of the schedule at the bottom of the page. If it looks accurate, click the blue Create Schedule button at the top-right of the page.

Note: Step 3 of a layer let's you specify when a layer applies. This is important when creating or making schedules that should be applied at a future point and not right now. Changes to this will reflect in the schedule preview, so make sure to review it carefully.

Editing a schedule

From there, locate thr schedule you wish to edit and click on the name of the schedule. After doing so, click the white Edit this Schedule button at the top-right of the page.

On this page, can edit the schedule a name, description, timezone to use, and layers to use (this contains the list of users and times to use). Once you are done, review the preview of the schedule at the bottom of the page. If it looks accurate, click the blue Save Changes button at the top-right of the page.