Use PagerDuty for paging and keep schedules as code

Cost

Paid. PagerDuty charges per user. No open source pager passes the five tests, as How explains.

How to do it

Paging must work when your own servers are down, so a managed service fits here. No open source pager passes the tests today. The open source Grafana OnCall is archived, and GoAlert has never had a stable 1.0 release. A self-hosted pager also needs a paid SMS and voice provider. PagerDuty has run since 2009, so judge it by the exit test. Its REST API lists every schedule, escalation policy, service and incident. Its official Terraform provider keeps the whole setup as code you can move to another tool. Route alerts to it from Alertmanager or Grafana. How to run the rota is in Run a fair on-call rota. Choose something else when your incident tool already includes on-call, such as Jira Service Management, and test its export first.

Examples

Using these examples: they show one way to follow this rule. Keep the behaviour and the check, not the syntax. Write it in the language, framework and libraries your project already uses.

Terraform example

resource "pagerduty_schedule" "primary" {
  name      = "Orders primary"
  time_zone = "Europe/Stockholm"
  layer {
    name                         = "Weekly"
    start                        = "2026-11-02T09:00:00+01:00"
    rotation_virtual_start       = "2026-11-02T09:00:00+01:00"
    rotation_turn_length_seconds = 604800
    users                        = [pagerduty_user.ana.id, pagerduty_user.ben.id]
  }
}

YAML example

# alertmanager.yml
receivers:
  - name: on-call
    pagerduty_configs:
      - routing_key_file: /etc/alertmanager/pagerduty-key
route:
  receiver: on-call

How to check

terraform plan shows 0 changes against the live account. A test alert reaches the person on call by phone within 5 minutes.

Sources

• GoAlert releases
• PagerDuty REST API
• PagerDuty Terraform provider

Related rules

• Share on-call fairly in Operations
• Avoid paging tools that are shutting down in Software choices