Triage

How to route events to the right service and team

Good vs better vs best practices for routing events to the right service and team in PagerDuty.

When Does This Matter/Problem Scenario

When you want to limit incident triage and get accurate service-by-service reporting, it's important to ensure that incidents are immediately assigned to the proper PagerDuty service and team.

Why You Should Care

The faster an incident can be triaged and assigned to the proper service and team, the faster the incident can be worked on and resolved.

PagerDuty Practices

PagerDuty offers several ways in which you can ensure an incident lands in the right hands and triggers under the right service.

PagerDuty image

Description of Practices

Good

Send alerts to a service-level integration keys to trigger incidents on a specific service assigned to a specific escalation policy.

Better

Send alerts to an orchestration-level integration key with service routes to direct alerts to a specific service based on alert content.

Best

Send alerts to an orchestration-level integration key with dynamic or static service routes and escalation rules to direct alerts to different services and/or escalation policies based on the alert content.

To indicate issues impacting a specific service, PagerDuty's engineering teams send their alerts to an integration key associated with a specific service.

To separate out which alerts are impacting which systems, PagerDuty's Infrastructure Team routes their alerts to multiple services based on the alert content.

To ensure specific requests are routed to the right on-call team, PagerDuty's Professional Services teams uses dynamic escalation policy rules to assign different requests to different people based on their skillset and expertise. Read their story here