Recommendations for setting up Pagerduty

Cortex recommends setting up PagerDuty on a service level, so you can easily view who is on call for a service directly within that service’s home page. You can also use the Cortex Slackbot to see who is on-call — the /cortex oncall service-tag command will return who is on call at a given time. Plus, the on-call assistant will send notifications to on-call team members when an incident is triggered for a specific service.

While you can set up PagerDuty on a Team level, you will only be able to view on-call rotation info from a Team page in Cortex. 

This approach also comes with a few other long-term benefits:

• Structuring PagerDuty 1-1 with services enables better alert routing and analytics, something that organizations struggle more with when PagerDuty is set up on a team level. 
• With a service-level setup, it’s also easier to enforce that all services have a compliant on-call policy enacted in PagerDuty, especially when making use of Scorecards.
• The service-level setup is less reliant on team members tagging incidents with service info because services and incidents are already linked.
• By setting up PagerDuty on a service level, you also gain the ability to get data from your Cortex catalog into PagerDuty, such as tier/criticality. By tying the service entities in the catalog with those in PagerDuty, you can automate processes and streamline severity protocols.