PagerDuty export incidents: what timelines and postmortems exist and how deep they go

What does PagerDuty hold, and how far back can you get it?

PagerDuty holds the record of how a company responds when something breaks: the alert that fired, who was paged, who acknowledged, what they did, when it was resolved and, if the team writes them, the postmortem. How far back the data reaches depends on the plan and the retention the company has in place, so the useful first question is how old the oldest incident the admin can open actually is.

This page is for fractional CTOs and engineering advisers. It explains what these records contain, how to check depth, and how to flag a candidate company without seeing any incident.

Why incident records are multi-step operational data

An incident is a short, high-stakes workflow with a clear start, a series of decisions and an outcome. That structure is what agent builders look for.

The postmortem is the most reasoned part, but the timeline is the most structured. Ideally a company has both for the same incident.

Which export routes should you ask about?

PagerDuty exposes incident data through its interface, reports and an API. Coverage, limits and retention change with plan and time, so check PagerDuty's current documentation for the account in question and avoid assuming any figure.

1. Ask whether the admin has ever exported incident lists, and with which fields.
2. Ask whether the log entries and notes inside each incident were captured, or only the headline fields.
3. Ask where postmortems live. Many teams write them in a wiki or document tool, not in PagerDuty, so the export must cover both places.
4. Ask whether analytics reports were saved, since they may be easier to regenerate than the raw events.
5. Ask who would run the API pull, and whether the key is held by a person who is leaving.

The ServiceNow side of the same story is covered in the incident, change and knowledge records page, and a team that moved between tools may hold a longer combined history.

What does the retention question look like in practice?

Compare with the Dialpad call and transcript page, where the same question, what exists and for how long, applies to spoken records.

How a partner spots a candidate company

• Operating at scale: a customer-facing product or service that must stay online, with an on-call rotation of more than a handful of people.
• Years of use: the tool in place for several years across multiple services.
• Culture of writing things down: postmortems written for significant incidents.
• Company size: consistent with 50+ full-time employees at peak (contractors excluded).
• Own systems: incidents concern the company's own product or infrastructure, not a named client's environment.
• A named owner: a head of platform, SRE lead or CTO who can speak to retention.

Managed service providers deserve a special check. Incidents on a client's systems describe the client's environment, so ownership and consent have to be settled before they could be considered.

What stays out

• Incidents that expose customer personal data, credentials or security vulnerabilities not yet fixed.
• Records about a client's infrastructure held by an outsourcer.
• Anything covered by confidentiality obligations to a customer who has not agreed.

Redaction and scope are agreed between SourceX and the company before work begins. You never need to look at an incident to make the introduction.

What to say

See the fractional CTO overview for other conversations where this fits, such as a monitoring consolidation.

How the introduction and rewards work

You introduce the company and give basic fit facts. SourceX qualifies it, the company builds a data inventory using the data inventory builder or its own list, price and terms are agreed, buyers review, and the deal closes before delivery. See the who qualifies page for the baseline.

Partners earn 25% of the eligible platform fees SourceX actually collects from the referred company's licensing deals, capped at $100,000 per referred company. Payment follows only after the buyer pays and SourceX receives its fee; no reward is guaranteed, and the reward is never deducted from the company's proceeds.

When to skip it

Skip when incident history is only a few months old, the company runs mostly client environments, or its owner will not consider an exclusive license.

Next step

If a company you advise has years of incidents and written postmortems, register as a partner and make the introduction, or have the sponsor apply at sourcex.si/apply with your referral link.