3 ways to automate PagerDuty

Customer confidence is hard to win and easy to lose. And when it comes to software, being slow to respond to issues can erode that relationship altogether.

PagerDuty is one of the leading tools for helping IT teams resolve issues fast. But as your digital operations grow, it can be difficult to keep up. Identifying what processes aren't scaling well—and the tools and workflows you can put in place to remedy that—is essential to creating a smooth system that grows with your team.

That's where automation comes in. By pairing PagerDuty with Zapier, you can automate key parts of your workflow and get back to working on what matters. Here's how.

Table of contents

• Trigger new incidents automatically

• Alert your team when an incident is assigned to them

• Duplicate PagerDuty incidents on other platforms

Trigger new incidents automatically

Manually creating new incidents in PagerDuty is a time-consuming process—but it doesn't have to be. If you're collecting incident reports and transferring them to PagerDuty by hand (well, technically, by keyboard), you can use Zapier to connect your other tools to PagerDuty and eliminate the manual workload.

From email and chat tools

Many companies have an email inbox or Slack channel that serves as a dedicated place to report incidents. Monitoring that channel, though, is time-consuming, and it's all too easy to miss a report. If you could automate this process, you could be assured that every incident report from email and chat makes it into PagerDuty automatically.

With the Zaps below, you can trigger new incidents in PagerDuty every time there's a new email, channel post, mention, or even Slack reaction. 

From an RSS feed

If you're getting updates on your digital operations via RSS, you can use this Zap to trigger a new incident in PagerDuty automatically.

Once this Zap is on, it will trigger for every new item in your RSS feed, reliably adding all its information as a new incident without manual data entry (and the human error that comes with it).

From your website monitoring tools

You can't afford to waste a second when your website or web app goes down. By syncing your website monitoring tool with PagerDuty, you can trigger a new incident automatically as soon as one is created in your website monitoring platform. Instead of letting incidents cascade through disconnected communication channels, you can automate your incident routing process to send critical alerts (with full context) to the right people, right away. Can cut out the manual admin work and get your team moving faster to minimize downtime.

On a schedule

Not every incident in PagerDuty has to be an emergency. Sometimes, it's about staying ahead of the chaos—like running daily checks, verifying backups, or making sure overnight jobs ran smoothly. Automation lets you trigger incidents on a set schedule, so your team can stay proactive instead of playing catch-up.

Maybe you'd like to create a regular prompt to review security logs or check system health before the morning rush. Or, if your globally distributed team rotates on-call engineers, a daily scheduled incident can help keep everyone on the same page regardless of time zone or handoff schedules. It's also great for operational rhythms, like sprint wrap-ups or prepping for an upcoming release. 

From customers

When customers report a problem, they're not thinking about your internal processes—they just want a quick resolution. But if those requests come in through live chat, a support form, or a ticketing system, there's often a delay before they reach the team that can actually fix the issue.

Automation closes that time gap. For example, you can use these Zaps to create an incident when a critical ticket comes in through Freshdesk, a bug is reported through a Google Form, or a conversation in Intercom is tagged as urgent. No more relying on another team to escalate the issue manually—your response process can kick off instantly.  

Pro tip: Add a filter step to set up specific parameters for the types of activity that trigger the Zap. You don't want every Intercom conversation or Freshdesk ticket to be sent to PagerDuty, after all—just the ones your team can do something about.

From anywhere else

If you're gathering customer issues using a tool that doesn't have a Zapier integration, webhooks are a great way to capture them. Just set up your custom webhook and use this Zap template to capture that information and add it to PagerDuty automatically.

Alert your team when an incident is assigned to them

Asking your team to keep an eye on their PagerDuty notifications—along with Slack, email, and other platforms you're using for work—is a tall order. When notifications are coming at you from everywhere, it's helpful to channel them all into one place.

With the Zaps below, you can immediately inform your team when a new incident is triggered in PagerDuty on the platform of their choice. Whether that's email, chat, or even text, you can ensure that no notification goes unaccounted for.

Of course, you don't want to spam your team's Slack or Discord channel. Getting notifications for every PagerDuty incident could be just as bad for productivity as not being notified at all. You can avoid spamming your channels by adding a filter step to only watch for certain kinds of activity, or add a digest step to send a summary of the day's incidents in one concise message.

Duplicate PagerDuty incidents on other platforms

Not everyone in your company may have PagerDuty access. For security's sake, it's often best limit access to tools with potential sensitive information in them to those who need it. You might also limit the number of team members with access to a particular tool to save money for your company.

Unfortunately, being prudent can come with some logistical issues. If you need to loop in another team on a particular incident, for example, it's difficult to do when all of the records are only in PagerDuty.

With the Zaps below, you can automatically duplicate newly triggered incidents in PagerDuty to other platforms—lending you the ability to work with other teams without giving access to potentially sensitive apps.

Pro tip: Data coming from PagerDuty doesn't always arrive in the most readable—or useful—format. A formatter step can clean up, reshape, or even extract just the pieces of data you actually need before passing it along to the next tool. 

For example, you might convert a PageDuty timestamp from ISO format to something a little more human-readable. You can also use the text formatter to extract the first few lines of an incident report (leaving out the raw metadata and internal logs) before it shows up in Notion or Asana.

Enable your digital ops

Your IT and DevOps teams have a lot on their plate—managing PagerDuty shouldn't add to it. When you create automated systems for your incident management processes, you streamline your team's work and prevent unnecessary bottlenecks from creating bigger problems down the road. For example, here's how an IT team might use automation to manage everything from incident reporting to notifications and internal data syncing:

Automation won't fix every incident that pops up, but it will help power the processes that enable your team to work faster and continue earning your customers' trust.

This article was originally published in December 2022 by Will Harris. It was most recently updated in April 2025 by Nicole Replogle.