At PagerDuty we’ve invested in superior reliability of our service. We strive for 100% uptime to ensure that any events detected by your monitoring tools are routed to the correct person on your team via a PagerDuty alert.

While we don’t expect outages to inhibit PagerDuty’s ability to send alerts, having a contingency plan never hurts and could mitigate disruption caused by an unavoidable and unexpected outage.

We also wish to provide excellent support and transparency for our customers who rely on our service. We won’t shy away or put a spin on a major downtime, first and foremost its imperative that we communicate with you. Lastly, within a few days of our outage we will post the details of what went wrong and how we intend to prevent similar incidents in the future on our blog.

Make Sure You’re Notified of a PagerDuty Outage

We recommend that you participate in our opt-in Twitter notification system. Specifically for PagerDuty-wide outages we have a dedicated Twitter account, @PagerDutyOps. Through Twitter, you can receive SMS notifications when accounts you select individually post an update. You can also receive Push Notifications for accounts.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through setting up Twitter SMS notifications so you can notified of any PagerDuty outage. We promise not to spam you with non-essential information from this account.

1. Click on “Settings” from the Account Information drop down menu.

2. Click “Mobile” in the left-hand setting navigation menu.

You will be asked to input your mobile telephone number to activate your phone. Once activated you will need to text “GO” to 40404.

3. Check “Tweets from people you’ve enable for mobile notifications” this will make sure that you receive the notifications we set up in the next step.

By default many of these fields are selected. We recommend deselecting all the other fields to avoid alert fatigue.

4. Visit @PagerDutyOps’ profile page and click “Turn on mobile notifications” from the Account Actions drop down menu.

Viola! You will now receive SMS alerts if there is a outage that prevents PagerDuty alerts from being sent.

Okay, But What If Something Minor Happens or I Have a Question?

Our support team is available via email, telephone and live chat weekdays between 9:00 AM and 6:00 PM PST. In addition, we have set up a support account on Twitter, @PagerDutyHelp.

From @PagerDutyHelp we will quickly address any issues that you may experience, inform you of updates to our app and notify you of any issues are less serious or only impact a small number of customers.

Lastly, we have our @PagerDuty Twitter account where we will announce major product releases, share our blog posts and thought provoking IT content that we’ve stumbled upon across the web.

Questions or comments? Shoot us a tweet at @PagerDutyHelp or email us at support@pagerduty.com