A long time ago, back in the early days of 2017, we open-sourced our Incident Response Documentation, the reference point for all our internal processes when it comes to major incidents. While the feedback was overwhelmingly positive, one question kept popping up:

“This is great! But how do we actually do it?”
– Literally Everyone

One of the intentions behind open-sourcing our docs was to help those who may just be starting out skip all the growing pains we went through. Based on the framework used by first responders, there’s a considerable breadth of content in there, and it can be a bit too much to digest if you’ve never done anything like it before. While it includes some material on training, we mostly describe our training process rather than showing the training itself.

No more! I’m happy to announce that we’ve now updated the documentation to include our Incident Response Training course. This is our introductory course on incident response and the role of the Incident Commander (IC), and is based on the same training that PagerDuty employees go through as their first step toward becoming an IC.

Similar to our two open-sourced security training courses (I know, shameless plug. But seriously, they’re pretty good!), the site presents all of the slides and notes, along with a PDF version to download.

We’ve been refining the course for over a year, and if you attended one of our PagerDuty Summit Series or Connect events, then you may have already had a sneak peek at the content. As an added bonus, we’ve also included a recording of the training from our Summit Series Chicago 2017 event. This is an earlier version of the training than what you’ll find on the open-source site, but it gives you a good idea of how the course is usually presented.

We hope you’ll find the content useful as a resource to help bring more people up to speed on incident response within your organizations. Since this new material is an addition to our current documentation, it is available in the same repository on GitHub under the same license terms, and we appreciate all friendly contributions from the community.

If you’re interested in longer training courses on the topic of incident response, including how to use PagerDuty to do it, we also offer a variety of different customer training programs as part of PagerDuty University—from private full-day courses at your own offices, to public instructor-led training. Email pdu@pagerduty.com for more information.