How to Route PulsAPI Alerts to PagerDuty for On-Call Escalation

PagerDuty is the gold standard for on-call incident management. PulsAPI is the leading platform for monitoring third-party cloud service health. Together, they close a critical gap: when AWS goes down, Stripe has an outage, or GitHub is degraded, your on-call engineer gets paged automatically — without anyone having to manually trigger an incident.

Without this integration, your team's on-call coverage only extends to incidents you cause. Your own deployments, your own code. Third-party outages are typically caught by customers, not engineers — leading to reactive firefighting instead of proactive response.

The PulsAPI + PagerDuty integration means that a critical outage at any of your 247+ monitored services becomes an incident in PagerDuty within seconds of detection. Your on-call rotation kicks in automatically.

You'll need a PulsAPI Business plan or above — PagerDuty integration is a Business+ feature. You'll also need a PagerDuty account with permission to create services and integrations.

In PagerDuty, you'll create an Events API v2 integration on a service. This generates a routing key (also called an integration key) — a 32-character token that PulsAPI uses to send events to the right PagerDuty service.

If you're new to PagerDuty, their documentation covers how to create a service and add an integration. The key piece you need from PagerDuty is the routing key from your Events API v2 integration.

In PagerDuty: Navigate to Services → Service Directory, select (or create) the service that should receive PulsAPI alerts. Click Integrations → Add an integration, search for 'Events API V2', and click Add. Copy the Integration Key shown — this is your routing key.

In PulsAPI: Go to Settings → Integrations. Click Connect under PagerDuty. Paste your routing key in the field labeled 'PagerDuty Routing Key' and give the integration a name like 'Production Alerts'. Click Save.

Click the Test button to send a sample event. You should see a new incident appear in PagerDuty within 5 seconds. If it doesn't appear, double-check the routing key and ensure your PagerDuty service is not in maintenance mode.

Severity mapping: PulsAPI maps status severity to PagerDuty event severity automatically. Major Outage and Partial Outage statuses trigger 'critical' events. Degraded Performance triggers 'warning' events. Maintenance windows trigger 'info' events.

Create separate PagerDuty services for different tiers of vendor criticality. For example, a 'Critical Vendors' PagerDuty service (AWS, Stripe, your primary database) that pages immediately, and a 'Non-Critical Vendors' service that creates incidents but doesn't page.

Use PulsAPI's alert rules to control which service status changes trigger PagerDuty. You might only want to page on Critical or High severity changes, not informational degraded states for less important services.

Combine PagerDuty escalation with Slack notifications for full coverage. Use PulsAPI's Slack integration to post all status changes to your #ops channel, and PagerDuty for the severity-filtered subset that actually requires human action.