PagerDuty earthquake alerts
Tremor can open a PagerDuty incident when an earthquake affects one of your watched locations, so seismic events flow into the same on-call rotation you already use for outages and infrastructure alarms. This is part of Tremor Business at $49 a month. Like every Tremor alert, it is a notification of an earthquake that has already occurred, delivered within about a minute of the U.S. Geological Survey publishing it, and not advance notice of shaking.
How it works
Tremor sends events to PagerDuty through the Events API v2 using an integration key. Severity is mapped from the earthquake: a strong or nearby event, roughly magnitude 6 and above or with high modelled shaking intensity, is raised as critical, and smaller events as warnings. Repeated updates for the same earthquake and location collapse into a single incident through a deduplication key, so your responders see one incident per event rather than a stream of duplicates.
Setting it up, about three minutes
- Add a service integration in PagerDuty. On the service that should receive quake events, add an Events API v2 integration and copy its integration key.
- Paste the key into Tremor. In your watchlist, open Alert channels, choose Add PagerDuty, and paste the integration key. Tremor recognises the key format.
- Send a test. Use Send test to confirm an incident opens on the service, then route it through your normal escalation policy.
Who uses it
Site-reliability and operations teams that run distributed infrastructure use it to route earthquakes into existing on-call workflows: a quake near a data centre or facility becomes an incident with an owner, an escalation path, and an audit trail, handled the same way as any other production alert. That means no new tool for responders to learn and no separate inbox to watch. PagerDuty is a Tremor Business feature, alongside multi-site portfolio monitoring, impact history, and screening-level loss ranges.
What it is honest about
PagerDuty incidents describe earthquakes that have already happened. The benefit is routing and accountability: the right on-call engineer is paged automatically within about a minute of the official data, instead of someone noticing later. Tremor does not predict earthquakes and cannot page before shaking.
Frequently asked questions
How does Tremor set PagerDuty severity for an earthquake?
Severity is derived from the event. Larger or closer earthquakes, roughly magnitude 6 and above or with high modelled shaking intensity at your location, are raised as critical; smaller ones are warnings. This keeps a distant minor quake from paging an on-call engineer at the same level as a strong nearby event.
Will one earthquake create multiple PagerDuty incidents?
No. Tremor attaches a deduplication key based on the event and location, so updates about the same earthquake collapse into a single incident rather than paging repeatedly. You get one incident per event per watched location.
Which plan includes PagerDuty?
PagerDuty routing is part of Tremor Business at $49 a month, which also adds multi-site portfolio monitoring, impact history, and screening-level loss ranges. It uses the PagerDuty Events API v2, so it fits into your existing services and escalation policies.