1Log in to PagerDuty
Sign in at your-subdomain.pagerduty.com. You need a role that can create services (Manager or Admin).
Create your first PagerDuty service with an email integration
Make a service, attach an email integration, and forward alerts to one address — you'll be paging yourself within five minutes.
The process
The complete path from login to a working alert address. Each crumb maps to a Directions step.
Directions
2Create or pick an escalation policy
Go to People → Escalation Policies. Create one that pages you (or your team) and add a second level so unacknowledged alerts escalate. A service must have a policy, so do this first.
3Services → New Service
Open Services → Service Directory → New Service. Name it for the system it monitors (e.g. "Marketing site uptime"), and attach the escalation policy you just made.
4Add an Email integration
On the Integrations step choose Email. PagerDuty generates a unique inbound address. Set the incident-creation rule (open a new incident on each email is the simplest start).
Generated address: marketing-site-uptime@your-subdomain.pagerduty.com
5Send a test email
Email that address from anywhere. An incident should appear within seconds and your escalation policy should page you. Point your monitoring tool's alert email at this address and you're live.
Common issues & fixes
Test email didn't open an incident.
Confirm you used the exact generated address and that the integration is Email (not Events API). Check the service isn't in maintenance/disabled state.
Every email opens a duplicate incident.
Switch the email management rule to deduplicate on subject or a regex key so repeated alerts group into one incident.
Alerts open but no one gets paged.
The escalation policy has no notification rule or the on-call user has no contact method. Add a phone/push contact and a notification rule.
Vendor alerts are too noisy.
Use event rules to suppress or route low-priority subjects, rather than turning the whole integration off.
Written and maintained by Ben McDaniel. Drafted with AI assistance and human-reviewed against each vendor's current setup flow. Vendor interfaces change — if a step looks different, the underlying record is what matters.