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Incident Management

Incident Roles

Define responder roles and responsibilities for efficient incident management.

Incident roles allow you to customize a set of roles that you can assign during an incident. An established set of incident roles clearly defines incident responsibilities, promotes accountability, and enables efficient response.

Incident roles listed within the incident responders user interface Incident Roles in Responders list

Availability by Plan

Role TypeProfessionalBusinessEnterprise
Predefined Roles (Incident Commander, Customer Liaison):heavy_check_mark::heavy_check_mark::heavy_check_mark:
Custom Rolesone10 (for a total of 12 incident roles)

Contact the Sales Team to upgrade or expand your incident roles feature set.

Incident Response Guide

For more information on how teams at PagerDuty use roles in their incident management process, refer to the Incident Response Guide.

Default Incident Roles

There are two default incident roles:

  • Incident Commander
  • Customer Liaison

Your account plan determines whether these roles are available. You can enable these roles to use them on incidents. For detailed configuration steps, see Enable or Disable Incident Roles.

The incident roles dashboard displaying default roles Incident roles

Create Incident Roles

Required User Permissions

Global administrators and the account owner can create, edit, and delete account-wide incident roles.

Note

Your pricing plan determines whether you can create roles. See the Availability by Plan table.

  1. Navigate to Incidents Incident Roles.

  2. Click New Role.

  3. On the New Role screen, complete the following fields and click Create Role:

    FieldDescription
    Display NameA role name to display on incidents.
    Role NameA unique name for API use. This name can contain only lowercase letters, numbers, and underscores.

    Note: You cannot change the Role Name after role creation.
    DescriptionHelp responders understand the scope of the role and how they should use it.
    Disable Incident RoleSelect Enable or Disable. Disabling a role removes it from future incidents. Existing incident roles and assignees remain unaffected.

The configuration screen used to create a new incident role Create role modal

Edit Incident Roles

  1. Navigate to Incidents Incident Roles.

  2. Click the role you want to edit.

  3. On the edit screen, modify the details using the following fields and click Save Changes:

    FieldDescription
    Display NameEdit the role name.
    DescriptionEdit the description to help responders understand the scope of the role and how they should use it.
    Disable Incident RoleSelect Enable or Disable depending on your preference. If disabled, the role no longer appears on incidents. Existing incident roles and assignees remain unaffected.

The configuration screen used to edit an existing incident role Edit incident roles

Enable or Disable Incident Roles

To enable or disable an existing incident role:

  1. Navigate to Incidents Incident Roles.
  2. In the Ellipsis Icon () overflow menu next to the role you want to disable or enable, click Enable or Disable.

Delete Incident Roles

Deletion Warning

You cannot recover an incident role after deleting it.
  1. Navigate to Incidents Incident Roles.
  2. In the Ellipsis Icon () overflow menu next to the role you want to delete, click Delete.
  3. In the confirmation modal, type Delete in the text box and click Delete.

Assign an Incident Role

Once you create an incident role, you can assign the role to an incident responder.

Behavior When You Assign Roles to Non-Responders

If you assign a role to a user who is not already a responder on the incident, this action adds them as a responder. For more information on managing responders, see Add Responders to an Incident. The responder request includes the role assigned to the user.

You can assign an incident role in multiple ways:

FAQ