ApproveThis manages your PagerDuty Integration approvals.

Why Combine Approval Workflows with Incident Response?

Let’s get real: when your servers crash at 2 AM, the last thing anyone wants is a five-hour email chain debating whether to reboot or launch a full forensic investigation. PagerDuty’s great at alerting the right people when things break. ApproveThis? It’s the muscle that turns those “OMG WHAT DO WE DO” moments into structured, auditable decisions. Together, they turn chaos into process—without slowing things down.

The Business Case for Linking These Tools

Imagine this: A critical system outage hits. PagerDuty notifies the on-call team, but instead of a free-for-all, ApproveThis automatically routes approval requests for next steps. The finance lead gets a $10K cloud spend escalation to approve via email. The security team greenlights a temporary access request in two clicks. All decisions are logged, and incidents resolve 40% faster. That’s not a hypothetical—it’s what happens when you connect real-time alerts with structured approvals.

Use Cases That Actually Matter

We’re not here to sell you “integration synergy.” Here’s exactly how this combo solves problems for teams that can’t afford downtime or bureaucratic delays:

1. Approval Chains for Incident Response Playbooks

PagerDuty identifies an outage. Instead of relying on ad-hoc decisions, ApproveThis triggers predefined approval workflows based on incident severity. Example: A SaaS company auto-routes database migration approvals to engineering leads during outages, with fallbacks if primary approvers are OOO. Approvers don’t need PagerDuty logins—they just click “Approve” in their inbox.

2. Budget Controls During Crisis Mode

When PagerDuty detects a server overload, your team wants to spin up emergency cloud capacity. But surprise $20K AWS bills? No thanks. With ApproveThis’ calculated fields, you can set thresholds that auto-approve small spends (<$1K) but require CFO sign-off for larger amounts. The kicker? All this triggers directly from PagerDuty incident data via Zapier.

3. Cross-Team Audits Made Less Painful

Post-mortems suck less when you have a paper trail. Every PagerDuty incident that requires approval (think: production deployments, third-party vendor access) automatically generates an ApproveThis audit log. Legal teams love this. Compliance teams borderline enjoy their jobs again.

Industry-Specific Wins

This isn’t just for tech bros in hoodies. Here’s how different verticals benefit:

Healthcare IT Teams

Patient portal goes down? PagerDuty alerts trigger ApproveThis workflows requiring HIPAA-compliant sign-offs before restarting systems. Bonus: Approval groups ensure both IT and compliance officers approve in parallel, not sequentially.

E-Commerce Operations

Black Friday traffic spikes trigger auto-scaling requests. ApproveThis routes cost approvals to budget owners based on real-time PagerDuty alerts. If the VP of Ops is skiing in Aspen? Vacation delegation pushes requests to their deputy automatically.

Financial Services

Fraud detection incidents in PagerDuty require tiered approvals—analyst > manager > CISO. ApproveThis enforces this sequence with role-based access, and integrates with Slack so denials trigger immediate lockouts.

Setting This Up Without Losing Your Mind

No PhD in “Zapier-Fu” required. Here’s the basic flow:

1. Connect PagerDuty and ApproveThis via Zapier (takes 8 minutes)
2. Choose triggers: New incidents, status changes, etc.
3. Map PagerDuty data to ApproveThis fields (severity → approval tier, service tag → department)
4. Set escalation rules: “If not approved in 15 mins, notify SVP”

Pro tip: Use ApproveThis’ calculated fields to auto-determine approval paths. Example: High-severity incidents in PagerDuty? Multiply response cost estimates by 2x and require L2 approvals.

Who Actually Benefits from This?

This isn’t a “nice-to-have” for orgs that hate money. Specific teams win big:

IT & DevOps

Reduce mean time to approve (MTTA) for incident responses by 65%. No more chasing down VPs who are allergic to Jira tickets.

Finance

Cap surprise infra costs by requiring pre-spend approvals tied to real incidents. ApproveThis’ reporting shows which incidents drove 80% of emergency budgets.

Security

Every PagerDuty alert about unauthorized access attempts can require mandatory SOC approvals before access is restored. Compliance stays happy; auditors stay off your back.

The Hidden Advantage: External Approvers

Here’s the thing—your third-party vendors don’t need (and shouldn’t have) access to PagerDuty. With ApproveThis, external partners get email-based approvals linked to incidents. They click “Approve,” PagerDuty auto-resolves the ticket. No logins. No training. No accidental settings changes.

What You’re Not Getting Elsewhere

Other approval tools require building everything from scratch. ApproveThis works out of the box with PagerDuty’s data model. Conditional logic based on incident priority? Prebuilt. Escalation paths that mirror your on-call rotations? Done. Audit trails that map to post-mortem timelines? Obviously.

Ready to Stop Guessing Who Approved What?

If you’re using PagerDuty, you’re already serious about uptime. Adding ApproveThis means you’re serious about decision-making velocity. No more “I thought Sarah approved that!” at 3 AM. No more finance vs. engineering cage matches over unplanned spend.

Register for ApproveThis and connect it to PagerDuty in under 10 minutes. Or, if you like talking to humans who don’t judge your caffeine intake, book a demo.