PagerDuty doesn't just alert you of problems using SMS and phone calls — it lets you take action directly from your mobile phone. The on-call engineer has the option to acknowledge, escalate or resolve a triggered incident by replying to the alert SMS, or by pressing a key during a phone alert.
A triggered incident can be acknowledged. Acknowledging an incident is a bit like hitting the snooze button on an alarm clock — PagerDuty stops alerting the on-call engineer about the incident. And just like snooze, the incident acknowledgement can be configured to time out and re-alert after a certain amount of time. The purpose of acking an incident is to signal that you've received the alert and are working on fixing the problem.
An incident can also be escalated to another engineer. This feature comes in handy when you're on the bus, and don't have access to a computer to handle the problem yourself.
Finally, incidents that require no additional action can be resolved directly from the phone.
