PagerDuty Foundational Practitioner study plan
PagerDuty Foundational Practitioner · Give each week a clear focus.
8 weeks · About 7 hours per week
Incident Management
Map the full PagerDuty incident lifecycle from detection through post-incident review, naming each stage and the artifact produced at it
Distinguish incident vs. alert vs. event in PagerDuty's data model and explain how each flows into the other
Configure a test service with an escalation policy and demonstrate notification routing to on-call responders
Explain severity levels, urgency, and priority as separate levers and when each drives behavior
Your checkpoint
A one-page annotated lifecycle diagram plus a working test service with escalation policy and a screenshot-free written walkthrough of one simulated incident
Incident Management
Configure on-call schedules including overrides, handoffs, and follow-the-sun rotation patterns
Design an escalation policy with tiered timeouts and explain the tradeoff between escalation speed and false-page tolerance
Describe incident status transitions (triggered, acknowledged, resolved) and the responder actions that cause each
Set up stakeholder communication and status updates during an active incident
Your checkpoint
A written incident response runbook for a fictional service covering schedule, escalation, status transitions, and communication cadence
Signal Intelligence
Explain the event ingestion pipeline from source integration through deduplication, correlation, and alert creation
Configure deduplication keys and alert grouping rules and predict how sample event streams will group
Tune an alert with suppression and auto-resolution behavior and state the failure modes of each
Differentiate noise-reduction techniques by the problem each solves
Your checkpoint
A table of at least 10 sample events with expected grouping and deduplication outcomes, plus a written rationale for each grouping decision
Signal Intelligence & Automation
Build an Event Orchestration ruleset that routes events by payload attributes to the correct service
Use Global Orchestration to apply shared routing logic and explain precedence relative to service-level rules
Write extraction and transformation logic that enriches an event payload before routing
Explain how orchestration differs from alert grouping and when to use both together
Your checkpoint
A documented orchestration design covering global and service-level rules, with a decision table mapping at least 6 payload patterns to routing outcomes
Automation
Create an automation action that runs on incident trigger and one that runs on incident resolve
Design a runbook automation flow that remediates a common failure and returns a result to the incident timeline
Explain how automation actions integrate with orchestration and incident workflows without creating loops
Identify guardrails for safe automation, including scoping, idempotency, and rollback
Your checkpoint
A written automation playbook describing two actions (one trigger-based, one resolve-based) with inputs, outputs, failure handling, and rollback steps
PD Reliability Platform and Paige, PagerDuty's SRE Agent
Explain what the PagerDuty Operations Cloud reliability platform comprises and how its components relate
Describe Paige, PagerDuty's SRE agent, and the kinds of tasks it assists with versus tasks it does not own
Interpret reliability signals such as incident frequency, MTTA, and MTTR and explain what each reveals about operational health
Articulate how post-incident review outputs feed back into service improvement
Your checkpoint
A reliability review memo for a fictional service covering at least 4 metrics, their interpretation, and two concrete improvement actions
Integrations and Developer Platform
Compare the REST API, Events API v2, and webhooks by purpose, direction, and typical use case
Describe the authentication model for API access and the principle of least privilege for API keys
Explain how a native integration differs from a custom integration built on the Events API
Outline the developer workflow for building and testing an integration against a sandbox service
Your checkpoint
An integration selection guide mapping 5 scenarios to the correct API or integration type with justification for each choice
Incident Management & Signal Intelligence & Automation & PD Reliability Platform and Paige, PagerDuty's SRE Agent & Integrations and Developer Platform
Synthesize all five domains into a single end-to-end scenario from signal ingestion to post-incident review
Rehearse weak areas identified in earlier deliverables and close remaining gaps
Practice explaining tradeoffs aloud, since scenario questions test judgment rather than recall
Verify terminology consistency across all personal notes and study artifacts
Your checkpoint
A complete written end-to-end scenario walkthrough touching all five domains, plus a personal gap list with each item marked resolved or flagged for review
Milestones
Week 2: Can explain incident lifecycle, severity versus urgency, and escalation design without notes, and has a finished runbook artifact
Week 4: Can predict deduplication and grouping outcomes for a new event stream and justify orchestration routing rules
Week 6: Can describe automation guardrails and Paige's role, and has produced both the automation playbook and reliability memo
Week 8: Can walk through a full signal-to-post-incident scenario covering all five domains and has no unresolved items on the personal gap list