As one customer put it: “We spend 99% of our time on our ITSM platform and only 1% on PagerDuty.”

This simple statement highlights the beauty of PagerDuty—it’s a low-maintenance tool that just works. However, even the best tools benefit from a little governance to ensure they’re being used effectively. Enter the PagerDuty Champions—a small, part-time team dedicated to keeping your incident management practices sharp and your teams productive.

Why Governance Matters for PagerDuty

PagerDuty is designed to streamline incident management, but without proper oversight, even the best tools can fall short of their potential. Governance ensures that teams are using PagerDuty’s features effectively, avoiding inefficiencies, and continuously improving their incident response processes.

The good news? This doesn’t require a full-time role. A pair of PagerDuty Champions—two individuals backing each other up—can handle this responsibility with minimal time investment, especially after the initial onboarding phase. Their mission? To keep PagerDuty running smoothly and help teams climb the maturity ladder of incident management.

The PagerDuty Champions’ Checklist

To maintain a high standard of incident management, the PagerDuty Champions should focus on the following tasks, ideally on a quarterly basis (or more frequently if needed):

1. Audit Schedules and Escalation Policies

• Identify inactive users in schedules or escalation policies and nudge teams to clean them up.

2. Monitor Key Metrics

• MTTA (Mean Time to Acknowledge) and MTTR (Mean Time to Resolve): Ensure incidents are being acknowledged and resolved promptly.
• Abnormal Incident Volumes: High numbers of incidents may indicate poorly calibrated monitoring.
• Excessive Incoming Events: This could point to misconfigured monitoring or APIs sending unnecessary data.
• Frequent P1 Incidents or Large Responder Groups: Overreaction to incidents can lead to productivity loss and burnout.

3. Review Business Services

• Ensure all services are meaningful and properly named. Avoid gaps or vague service definitions.

4. Close Long-Open Incidents

• Incidents lingering for more than a day should be flagged and addressed.

5. Promote Feature Adoption

• Low usage of features like incident workflows, event orchestration, or automation actions means teams are missing out on time-saving opportunities.
• Encourage the use of ChatOps and stakeholder notifications to improve communication during incidents.

Beyond the Basics: Driving Maturity and Engagement

The PagerDuty Champions should also focus on fostering a culture of continuous improvement. Here’s how:

• Maintain Terraform Code: Provide reusable Terraform templates for onboarding services and orchestration rules, making it easier for teams to get started.
• Host Regular Sessions: Organize sessions to showcase new PagerDuty features, share best practices, and highlight the most mature teams.
• Secure Executive Sponsorship: Help leadership understand the value of effective incident management and secure their support.
• Share Metrics and Insights: Regularly share stats on incident trends, team performance, and overall system health.
• Promote Certification: Encourage team members to pursue PagerDuty certifications and maintain a list of certified users.

How Much Time Does This Take?

The beauty of PagerDuty governance is that it’s a low-touch effort. With the right processes in place, the PagerDuty Champions can make a big impact with minimal time investment. Tools like Backstage by Spotify can help streamline PagerDuty governance by centralizing service management and ensuring alignment across teams.

The Benefits of PagerDuty Governance

Investing a small amount of time in PagerDuty governance can yield significant benefits:

• Increased Productivity: Teams spend less time firefighting and more time innovating.
• Better Service Quality: Faster incident resolution leads to greater reliability.
• Improved Customer Satisfaction: A smoother incident management process means happier customers.

Start Small, Win Big

If you’re not sure where to begin, start with a low-touch approach. Backstage can help streamline PagerDuty governance by providing a centralized platform to manage services, documentation, and ownership, ensuring teams stay aligned and efficient. Even simple steps—like auditing schedules or promoting feature adoption—can make a difference. The key is to start somewhere and build momentum over time.

Call to Action

Ready to level up your PagerDuty practices? Check out the best practices and resources available at university.pagerduty.com and response.pagerduty.com. With a little governance and the right tools, your teams can achieve incident management excellence.

Take the first step today—your PagerDuty Champions are waiting to make a difference!