Common PagerDuty Issues and Solutions

1. Delayed or Missing Notifications

Alerts do not reach responders in a timely manner, leading to delayed incident resolution.

Root Causes:

• Incorrect notification settings for on-call users.
• PagerDuty notification delivery system experiencing delays.
• Spam filtering or silent mode on mobile devices preventing alert reception.

Solution:

Verify that on-call users have correct contact information:

Settings → Users → Contact Methods

Check notification rules:

Settings → Users → Notification Rules

Ensure the PagerDuty app has the necessary permissions on mobile:

Settings → Apps & Notifications → PagerDuty

For email alerts, check spam/junk folders and whitelist @pagerduty.com emails.

2. Escalations Not Triggering

Incidents do not escalate to the next responder when the primary contact does not acknowledge them.

Root Causes:

• Misconfigured escalation policy.
• Escalation timeout settings too long or missing.
• Incident acknowledgement occurring before escalation triggers.

Solution:

Verify escalation policies:

Settings → Escalation Policies

Adjust escalation timeout settings:

Settings → Services → Escalation Timeout

Ensure that responders do not manually acknowledge incidents before escalation:

Incident Details → Acknowledged By

3. API Integration Failures

Automated alerts or custom applications fail to send incidents via the PagerDuty API.

Root Causes:

• Invalid API key or incorrect authentication method.
• Incorrect API payload format.
• Rate limiting blocking API requests.

Solution:

Verify API key validity:

Settings → API Access → API Keys

Ensure correct API payload format:

{
  "incident": {
    "type": "incident",
    "title": "Server Down",
    "service": { "id": "SERVICE_ID", "type": "service_reference" },
    "urgency": "high"
  }
}

Monitor API rate limits:

curl -X GET "https://api.pagerduty.com/rate-limits" -H "Authorization: Token token=YOUR_API_KEY"

4. Webhooks Not Delivering Alerts

Webhook-based notifications do not reach external systems such as Slack or monitoring dashboards.

Root Causes:

• Incorrect webhook URL or payload format.
• Webhook delivery failures due to firewall restrictions.
• Target system unavailable or rejecting requests.

Solution:

Check webhook configuration:

Settings → Extensions → Webhooks

Test webhook manually:

curl -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{ "message": "Test alert" }' WEBHOOK_URL

Review webhook logs in PagerDuty:

Settings → Extensions → Webhook Logs

5. Duplicate Alerts for the Same Incident

PagerDuty creates multiple incidents for the same issue, overwhelming responders.

Root Causes:

• Multiple monitoring tools triggering redundant alerts.
• Incident de-duplication settings misconfigured.
• Alert correlation rules missing or incorrect.

Solution:

Enable de-duplication by using the same dedup_key in API payloads:

{
  "event_action": "trigger",
  "dedup_key": "server-outage",
  "payload": {
    "summary": "Server down",
    "severity": "critical"
  }
}

Configure alert suppression in monitoring tools to prevent redundant triggers.

Use PagerDuty event rules to filter out duplicate alerts:

Settings → Event Rules

Best Practices for PagerDuty Optimization

• Regularly review on-call schedules and escalation policies.
• Ensure API keys and webhook integrations are correctly configured.
• Use deduplication settings to prevent excessive alert noise.
• Monitor notification logs to identify delivery failures.
• Test alerts and escalation workflows periodically.

Conclusion

By troubleshooting delayed notifications, failed escalations, API issues, webhook failures, and duplicate alerts, organizations can optimize their PagerDuty incident management workflows. Implementing best practices ensures a fast, reliable, and efficient alerting system.

FAQs

1. Why are my PagerDuty alerts delayed?

Check user notification rules, verify mobile app permissions, and whitelist PagerDuty email addresses.

2. How do I fix escalations not triggering?

Review escalation policies, adjust timeout settings, and ensure incidents are not manually acknowledged before escalation.

3. Why is my API integration failing?

Ensure API keys are valid, verify request payloads, and check rate limits.

4. How do I troubleshoot webhook failures?

Check webhook URLs, test connectivity using curl, and review webhook logs in PagerDuty.

5. How do I prevent duplicate alerts?

Use deduplication keys in API requests, configure alert suppression, and enable PagerDuty event rules.