PagerDuty Foundational Practitioner key terms

A record in PagerDuty that groups related alerts and the people working on them, tracking status, ownership, notes, and a timeline from trigger to resolution.

A single signal sent to PagerDuty by an integration, such as one monitoring check firing. Alerts can be grouped onto an incident and deduplicated by a key.

A value attached to each inbound event that tells PagerDuty which open incident the event belongs to, so repeat signals append to one incident instead of creating many.

The ordered states an incident passes through, typically triggered, acknowledged, and resolved, with optional escalation when nobody responds within the configured window.

An action by a responder indicating they have seen the incident and are taking ownership, which stops further escalation for that incident until it is resolved or reassigned.

Closing an incident once the underlying problem is fixed or judged no longer actionable, which stops notifications and records the outcome for later review and reporting.

A rule set defining who is notified first, how long they have to respond, and which users, schedules, or teams are contacted next if the incident stays unacknowledged.

One step inside an escalation policy, containing targets to notify and a timeout in minutes before PagerDuty moves the incident to the next level.

A modeled component of your system, such as an application or database, that owns an escalation policy and receives incidents from its own integrations and routing rules.

A schedule that determines which responder is currently responsible for a service, defined by shift handoff times, layers, and overrides for swaps or time off.

A temporary change to a schedule that replaces the normally assigned responder for a specific time window, commonly used for shift swaps or coverage gaps.

A user-level setting that controls how and when that person is contacted, including contact method, urgency filter, and delay before the notification is sent.

A verified channel such as push, SMS, phone call, or email that PagerDuty uses to reach a user; verification is required before the channel can receive notifications.

A per-incident attribute, high or low, that determines whether responders receive immediate interrupting notifications or lower-priority ones that can be batched.

A configurable label such as P1 through P5 assigned to an incident, used for triage ordering, reporting, and communicating business impact to stakeholders.

A repeatable set of manual steps, such as checklist items or runbook links, attached to an incident so responders follow a consistent response process.

A rule that merges multiple related alerts into fewer incidents, either by time window, by content similarity, or by an explicit grouping key in the event payload.

A rules engine that evaluates inbound events against conditions and applies actions such as routing to a service, setting severity or priority, suppressing, or enriching before an incident is created.

An Event Orchestration layer evaluated before service-specific routing, letting teams apply shared logic such as suppression or enrichment across all incoming events.

A condition-and-action pair inside Event Orchestration or an integration, matching on event fields and then setting fields, routing, or dropping the event.

Pulling a value out of an event payload, often with a regular expression, so it can populate a field such as deduplication key, severity, or custom details.

Deliberately preventing an event from creating or updating an incident, typically during maintenance windows or for known noisy conditions, while still logging the event.

A scheduled period during which alerts for chosen services are suppressed so planned work does not page responders, after which normal notification behavior resumes automatically.

A connection that lets an external tool send events to PagerDuty, configured with an integration key and often a payload format such as the Events API v2.

A unique identifier, sometimes called a routing key, that an external system includes when sending events so PagerDuty knows which service and integration should handle them.

PagerDuty's HTTP endpoint for sending alert events, accepting a JSON body with fields such as routing key, event action, deduplication key, payload, and severity.

An outbound HTTP callback PagerDuty sends when something happens, such as an incident triggering or resolving, used to update chat, ticketing, or other external systems.

PagerDuty's programmatic interface for reading and changing objects such as incidents, services, schedules, and users, authenticated with an API key and scoped by permissions.

A credential used to authenticate REST API calls, available in general-access and more restricted scoped forms, and treated as a secret because it grants account access.

A configured action, such as running a script or calling an external job runner, that PagerDuty can execute automatically or on demand against an incident.

Connecting PagerDuty incidents to automation platforms so diagnostic or remediation scripts run with incident context, reducing manual steps during response.

Written guidance describing how to diagnose and fix a known problem, usually linked from an incident or workflow step so responders follow proven steps under pressure.

A structured review after an incident that documents timeline, impact, contributing causes, and follow-up actions, aimed at learning rather than assigning blame.

The chronological record of an incident's events, including triggers, acknowledgments, notes, escalations, and resolutions, used for review and reporting.

A model of which services depend on which others, used in PagerDuty to show business impact, support incident correlation, and help responders judge blast radius.

A public or private page communicating current service health and active incidents to customers and stakeholders without exposing internal responder details.

Sending targeted updates about an incident to subscribers or business audiences, separate from responder paging, so non-responders stay informed without being on call.

Metrics, logs, and traces ingested or referenced by the platform to surface signals, correlate them with incidents, and support faster diagnosis during response.

PagerDuty's SRE agent that assists responders by summarizing incident context, surfacing relevant past incidents and diagnostics, and suggesting next investigative steps.

The broader set of PagerDuty capabilities beyond paging, covering on-call management, event intelligence, automation, analytics, and AI assistance for operating services reliably.