So you’ve been alerted to an incident via PagerDuty, but when you open the PagerDuty Incidents page at https://myaccount.pagerduty.com/incidents, you don’t see the incident under any of the headings - Open, Triggered, Acknowledged, Resolved, and Any Status. You know you got an alert, what could be wrong?
Unlike an alert or a suppressed event, an incident must be assigned to a user. The escalation policy determines whom an incident is assigned to. An escalation policy has one or more levels, and can accept either a schedule or a user as a target. An incident will escalate through the layers of an escalation policy until it finds someone who is on-call. This user will be notified and the incident will be assigned to them. If the user fails to acknowledge the incident before the time limit set on the escalation policy, the incident escalates to the next escalation level. -- https://support.pagerduty.com/docs/incidents
Incidents must be assigned to a user in PagerDuty. If you are the assignee of an incident, but you don’t see it in your incidents page in your account, where is it?
The incidents page has a number of useful features that might be making things a little tricky for you, especially if you’re responding to a high stress or urgent incident. Let’s take a look at a couple of possibilities.
Your Incidents Page Has a Specific Team Selected
As a PagerDuty user, you might belong to a number of different teams. Backend Engineering. API Escalation. Database Users. Third Floor Coffee Time Walkers. Incidents might belong to any of these teams. So the first thing to check in your incidents view is which team is highlighted. The teams selection is a dropdown menu on the right side of the incidents list panel.
In the dropdown, you’ll see the options for All Teams, My Teams, and then all the teams you belong to listed individually. Check here to see if you are looking at incidents for the right team. If you're not sure which team the incident would have come to, select My Teams first. Selecting All will show you all incidents in your entire account, for all teams in your organization.
Your Incidents Page Has an Urgency Filter
Another helpful feature of the incidents page is the Urgency filter. This is useful when you are looking for only incidents with High or Low urgency, but if you have a filter on, and the incident you are looking for is of the other type, it won't be in the list.
So the second thing to try is resetting your Urgency to Any in the filter dropdown. The Urgency filter is in the table headers, with Status, Priority, Urgency, etc. Click the funnel icon to see the filter choices.
Your Incident Was Reassigned to Another Responder
The last thing to check is whether the incident is still assigned to you. If you weren’t able to acknowledge the incident within the time specified in the escalation policy, the incident will be reassigned to the next responder. If you haven’t found your missing incident yet, see if it got escalated.
Incidents can also be manually assigned to another responder. Maybe someone on your team was performing some work on a service but didn't suppress alerts. If their task triggered an incident, they would be able to grab it on the incident page.
To look for all the incidents for your chosen teams from above, use the buttons directly below the teams dropdown. Here you’ll be able to select Assigned to me or All for the incidents in the specified team. This view will also help you if your incident was resolved by another responder or via automation. So if you don’t see an active incident, double-check the Resolved category and see if it’s there.
Access the Incident Directly
You can always go directly to an incident. Every object in PagerDuty has a unique ID, including incidents. The url for a specific incident will be https://myaccount.pagerduty.com/incidents/INCIDENTID. The incident ID is included in emails, but you might not see it in SMS messages. You can also add the incident ID in the search box beside the teams dropdown.
The incident's unique URL will never change, so it will always be available to refer to, even when the incident is resolved.
The View on the Mobile App
The web interface and the mobile app have a slightly different experience. The mobile app does not have all of the same search, sort, and filtering options that the web does, and the first place to look for your missing incident might be more obvious on mobile.
On the mobile app, it is at the top of the Open Incidents panel, and you can select your incidents: Mine, all incidents for your teams: My Teams, and all incidents in the account: All. You won’t have the option to select a single team in the My Teams panel, taking a bit of complexity out of your search.
You’ll be able to sort incidents by Urgency, Priority, or how Recent they are, but there is not a filter feature that will hide incidents from you the same way the web interface does.
Summary
You might find it a good practice to always reset your views at the start of your oncall shift, to make them the most open or applicable to your team’s practices. Setting the Urgency filter to Any, the Teams Dropdown to My Teams, and the assignment selection to All will give you a clear baseline for responding to incidents on a busy team.
If you’re not making use of the mobile app, give it a try! The simplified view might also help you manage incidents more effectively.
For more on PagerDuty, visit https://pagerduty.com or join our community at https://community.pagerduty.com!
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