On-Call Management
and Notifications

Alongside traditional layer-based schedules, PagerDuty now offers Shift-Based Schedules . This new scheduling system provides more flexibility than ever through quick-start templates for common coverage patterns, custom shifts, and multi-responder shifts for shadow training or stacked coverage. Both connect to escalation policies that route incidents to the right on-call responder automatically. Coming soon: add SRE Agent to your schedules and escalation policies, set permissions, and let it handle issues without waking up a human. Learn more .

PagerDuty supports phone calls, SMS, email, push notifications, and third-party messaging tools . Users have the ability to set up notification rules and retry mechanisms to guarantee alert delivery.

Yes. PagerDuty provides a REST API and Terraform provider. Teams can manage schedules, escalation policies, and services programmatically and keep configurations version controlled.

If the on-call responder does not acknowledge an alert, PagerDuty escalates it based on the defined policy. The alert continues to escalate until it is acknowledged or resolved.

Users can request schedule overrides in the PagerDuty web, mobile app, or by using an open schedule to claim unassigned shifts. Shift Agent automatically detects conflicts between your team's calendar and on-call shifts, identifies coverage conflicts, recommends available replacements, and facilitates the override via Slack DM, no manual toil involved.

Yes. PagerDuty supports scheduling across time zones. Teams can create rotations based on each user's local time, and schedules are displayed accordingly.

Users configure notification rules in their profile. They can choose channels such as phone, SMS, email, or push and define retry timing. Different rules can be set for high and low-urgency alerts.

An escalation policy defines who is notified for an incident and in what order, including AI agents that can triage or take predefined actions to reduce toil. If an alert is not acknowledged, it is passed to the next responder.

Yes. The PagerDuty mobile app allows users to view, acknowledge, escalate, and resolve incidents. It also supports push notifications and call routing.

Yes. Shift Agent automatically detects conflicts between PTO and on-call shifts, recommends available replacements, and facilitates the override via a direct Slack message. It also integrates with Google Calendar so your PTO and schedule data stay in sync. No other platform offers this capability natively.

Yes. Shift-based schedules (now Generally Available) include quick-start templates for common coverage patterns like Weekly Handoff, Workday/Weekend, and Follow the Sun. Custom schedules can also be built from scratch. Learn more .