Rate Limits

This page describes the rate limits for the PagerDuty Events API. The rate limits for the PagerDuty REST API are described here.

What are the limits?

The PagerDuty Events API uses rate limits to provide a consistent experience for all of our customers. The Events v2 API has a limit of approximately 120 calls/minute per integration key. The limit is calculated over a 60 second window looking back from the current time. Account level limits are also applied to ensure reasonable use.

The difference between an API call limit and an API rate limit

A call limit is the number of times you can invoke an API within a certain time period. It is often a limit imposed purely by a SaaS vendor's business choice (pricing/packaging) rather than for technical reasons of capacity or fairness.

A rate limit is one imposed by a vendor for reasons of fairness, so that one customer doesn’t overwhelm the vendor’s infrastructure with events or deny service to other customers.

What happens when a customer reaches the Events API rate limit?

The response to the API call will say 429 - Request Limit Exceeded and PagerDuty will not ingest the event.

What are possible workarounds to the Events API Rate Limit?

• Retrying requests - Simply retrying the request a moment later can help alleviate rate limiting. We suggest retrying 3 times with each request being 30 seconds apart.
• Integrations / Service - The rate limit applies per integration key. An easy solution is to increase the number of integration keys used on a service (fan out).
• Services - Another solution involves splitting a service into two or more. This includes the added benefit of being more specific with service definitions.
• In rare cases, engineering can raise the rate limit for Enterprise customers. This is rarely done, but please reach out to your account manager for more details.