Urgency — is tied to incidents and determines how you should be notified should the incident be assigned to you (high or low)
Severity — is tied to alerts and describes how impacted a specific service or piece of infrastructure is (critical, warning, error, etc.)
Priority — is tied to incidents and specifies the order in which incidents should be addressed (P1, Sev-1, etc.)
What's the difference between Urgency, Severity and Priority?
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I am struggling to understand how these relate and best practices on using these. The bottom line is that I want to automatically raise an incident, set the priority and then filter my incident list based on that priority. It boggles my mind why I can’t do that with the current functionality. The key seems to be the alert severity that you CAN set, but this doesn’t drive anything re: the incident priority.
Hey Chris, thanks for providing this feedback! You can automatically append incident priority when triggering incidents through the REST API. You can also get the different IDs for each priority level via the API so you know what ID to specify when making the trigger call.
As for sorting incidents by priority, this is something that we have on our roadmap. Feel free to check back in for updates!
Currently, severity and urgency do not tie directly into priority. If you have any specific feature requests or feedback around this, we would love to hear from you. We currently have an early access open for dynamic notifications that you might be interested in. This gives you the ability to determine notification urgency based on the severity of an incoming alert. You can set the severity of an incident directly via the API or by using event rules.
I hope this helps to clarify things! Please let us know if you have any other questions.
Thanks for that, Tyler. We are mostly using the out of the box integrations from tools like DataDog, etc. and struggling to understand how we can carry through events / alerts of varying criticality so we can prioritize the work of the support teams receiving the incidents. Make sense? Right now we’re are suggesting that they make a judgement call in terms of what the priority is (set is manually). Is there any other good way to handle this?
Hey Chris, thanks for the additional context. Currently we don’t have a way to dynamically set priority on incidents–it would need to either be set when triggering the incident initially or by appending a priority to the incident directly via the UI.
Using event rules to append severity to incoming events might be a good step for now as it can give your team some more context into how severely impacted a specific unit of infrastructure is.
I think what you might be looking for is to dynamically append incidents with a priority level, depending on the severity of incoming alerts. Does that sound like it might fit your use case? We’ve definitely received similar feedback around this from other customers and I’m happy to go ahead and submit a feature request for you.
You got it, Tyler. Dynamically setting incident priority based on criteria from alerts is what we are after. Thanks for logging the feature request. And I would say that request is of the highest… priority. 
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Absolutely, Chris! This is definitely something that we’ve received feedback on and I understand why this would be useful to a number of our customers. Feel free to reach out to support@pagerduty.com if you have any additional questions or would like to check in on your feature request.
Hey @crdeantonio – We just released dynamic notifications and I thought you might be interested in checking out the new feature. This gives you the ability to dynamically determine how urgent an incident is and in turn notify you based on either your low or high urgency notification rules. You can find some more info on getting up and running with this feature in our Knowledge Base. Feel free to reach out with any questions!
Stay tuned for more updates on sorting by incident priority as well!
What’s the difference between the Dynamic rule that was already in place vs Dynamic notifications, reading the information it seems so far as if they are the same. We’ve had the option to use Dynamic rules for a long time now at least I’ve seen that as an option for months if not since about a year now.