We’ll be rolling out new Slack capabilities to eliminate more manual toil from your incident workflow: click once to promote any alert to an incident, get dedicated channels created automatically, page responders without leaving Slack, and manage all your settings in one place.

This is part of our path to autonomous operations: reducing toil, protecting your capacity, and letting you stay in flow. If you’re only using PagerDuty for on-call scheduling, you’re missing the full picture. These Slack capabilities work best when they’re connected to the rest of the platform: Event Intelligence filtering your alerts, Agents triaging issues autonomously, and your entire incident workflow in one system.

Here’s What’s Coming (Early Access planned for May)

1. Get a dedicated channel for every big incident

You’ve been there: managing an incident in a shared channel while alerts keep coming in, scrolling back through hundreds of messages to find critical updates, watching new responders join and ask “what is happening?” because context is buried.

Automated dedicated incident channels fix this. When you declare an incident or promote an alert, PagerDuty will create a channel (like #inc-1234-database-outage) where:

• All incident activity goes to one place, including timeline, responder actions, status changes, and much more automation
• New responders see everything in one place, including the incident info pinned
• Your triage channels (for incoming alerts and problems) stay clean
• Post-incident reviews have a complete record

You’ll be able to control when channels get created. Set it by priority (P1 and P2 only), by incident type, or other options. For major incidents, broadcast status updates to announcement channels while keeping the detailed work in the dedicated channel.

Learn more about why dedicated incident channels are a best practice in this blog.

2. Page responders without leaving Slack

Mid-incident and need the database team? You’ll be able to simply type /pd oncall database to see who’s on-call and page them with one click. They’ll get notified and join the incident channel. You stay in Slack.

Works for any escalation: page a user, a team, or an escalation policy. No more switching to the web console to check schedules or create pages. Additionally, the /pd page command will bring up a modal with all on-call information from your escalation policies and more.

3. Manage all Slack settings in one place

If you’ve configured Slack integrations across multiple services and teams, you know the pain: settings scattered everywhere, inconsistent behavior, no clear way to see what’s configured where.

Soon, you’ll go to Integrations > Slack Configuration to manage:

• When dedicated incident channels get created (priority, service, team)
• Channel naming conventions and defaults
• Notification preferences
• Announcement channel configuration
• Slash command permissions
• Service-specific overrides

Configure once instead of multiple times. No more struggling with multiple settings.

4. Keep responders engaged

You are commanding an incident and need to check who is involved. Instead of asking in the channel or checking the web console, you’ll be able to see responders listed directly in the incident card.

Some new responder management capabilities will include:

Using /pd responder will allow you to:

• View responders with acknowledgment status directly in the incident card
• Re-notify responders who missed the initial page

You will also be able to re-open resolved incidents with one click and the original channel reactivates with all context.

All managed from Slack, so you stay focused on coordination.

5. New Way to Act on Alerts with Triage

See something wrong? You know the old workflow: see something serious, open the web console, declare the incident, figure out how to page, create a Slack channel, copy the alert details over. Too many steps.

Soon, you’ll be able to use our “Triage” stage to quickly mobilize teams around alerts:

Typing /pd triage and:

• A dedicated channel will be created automatically
• All alert context will carry over to the triage card
• You’ll be able to page responders
• After investigation, triage can be promoted to a major incident

No manual channel creation. No copy-paste. Just one click to start. And you can change the naming convention in your configuration area at any time.

6. Get your team up to speed with onboarding tutorials

In both the PagerDuty platform and inside Slack, we’re making it easier for new users to understand best practices. Tutorials will help users:

• Log in and authenticate the app
• Understand acknowledging and creating incidents
• Learn actions they can take to speed up MTTR

No separate training sessions. No documentation hunting. Your team learns the workflow right when they need it.

You Already Have the Platform, Use All of It

These capabilities build on Slack improvements we delivered earlier this year:

• Redesigned incident cards with clear information, updated emojis, and a better hierarchy of information.
• Threaded activity updates that keep incident activity organized and reduce channel noise.
• New intuitive slash commands with a modal that shows available commands and parameters.

But they’re part of something bigger: our path to autonomous operations. Built on 16 years of operational intelligence, PagerDuty is purpose-built for the AI era. Here’s what that means for you:

• Event Intelligence filters and groups your alerts before they hit Slack.
• SRE Agent can triage and fix issues before they page anyone. It runs diagnostics, executes remediation, and works directly in your Slack channels. When an incident does need human attention, the Agent has already done the initial investigation. You can even add SRE Agent directly to schedules and escalation policies as a virtual responder (available in Early Access).
• Bring in the right people, leveraging your on-call schedules and escalation policies. The /pd oncall command pulls from your existing schedules. Alert promotion pages the right people based on your escalation policies.
• Shift-left with developer integrations. PagerDuty’s MCP integrations bring operational context directly into tools like Cursor and Claude Code, so developers can build with confidence and prevent incidents before they happen.

When something breaks at 3 AM, you’re not juggling multiple tools or wondering which vendor to call. Everything flows through one system that you already know.

What to Expect Starting May 22, 2026

These capabilities will be available to all PagerDuty customers using Slack. Dedicated incident channels will be enabled by default, but you can customize or opt out at any time. 

We recommend reviewing your Slack configuration before the automatic rollout:

1. Log in to PagerDuty and navigate to Integrations > Slack Configuration
2. Review the default settings for dedicated incident channels
3. Customize based on your workflows (for example, create channels only for P1/P2 incidents)
4. Test the experience by declaring a test incident
5. Share with your team so everyone knows what to expect

Get started today

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