Event Report: Japan's Only Incident Response Competition "PagerDuty Challenge Cup" Concludes with Fierce Battle, Top 6 Elite Teams Crowned!

PagerDuty Inc. (Headquarters: Minato-ku, Tokyo; Representative Director and President: Nobuyuki Yamane; hereinafter: PagerDuty), a provider of incident management solutions, held "PagerDuty Tech Day 2026" on Wednesday, April 15, 2026, at Tokyo Midtown Hall. This event, themed "Discover the 'Fun' in Operations," is a technical conference where practitioners share real-world examples. In addition to lectures in the main hall and user case sessions, the special event "PagerDuty Challenge Cup Finals" was held in the hands-on room, attracting many participants including engineers.

The scene of the "PagerDuty Challenge Cup" finals held on April 15 (Wednesday).

What is the PagerDuty Challenge Cup?

It is Japan's only contest that comprehensively competes skills necessary for incident response, such as quick initial action, accurate judgment, teamwork, and communication with stakeholders. Participating teams utilize PagerDuty to respond to incidents occurring in a simulated incident environment called "PagerChat" and are scored based on the following four criteria:

【Scoring Criteria】

Incident Response Score: Identifying and resolving the root cause.

Communication Score: Appropriate information sharing with stakeholders such as CTO, customer support, and public relations.

MTTA Score (Mean Time To Acknowledge): Speed of incident acknowledgment.

Post-Incident Review Score: Quality of post-resolution review.

In this year's finals, the difficulty level was significantly increased from the preliminaries, with up to four simultaneous failures occurring in an AWS Kubernetes environment. Not only technical root cause identification but also appropriate communication with "CTO," "Customer Support," and "Public Relations" roles played by the organizers were evaluated, making it a highly advanced content that tested both technical skills and interpersonal skills.

The Final Round – Tense Incident Response Unfolding in Real-Time

The CTO (role) checking on the participating teams during the Challenge Cup competition.

In the finals, real-world situations that could occur on-site, such as sudden system failures, simultaneous failures of multiple services, and inquiries from management, occurred one after another.

Real-world developments on site

Six elite teams that won the preliminary rounds on Wednesday, February 25, and Tuesday, March 10, competed in the finals. During the contest, incidents occurred one after another in the virtual chat service "PagerChat." On the simulated SNS "PingPost," AI bots and spectators posted complaints such as "Chat is not working!" and "When will it be restored?" and these scenes were displayed on the venue's screen. Furthermore, a problem occurred where the virtual chat tool itself became unusable, creating a tense atmosphere reminiscent of a real incident.

With constantly changing incident statuses and real-time updated scoreboards, and facing tough questions from the CTO role such as "When will it be restored?" and "What is the business impact?", each team quickly responded by dividing roles into Incident Commander, Responder, and Scribe. Cheers erupted from the audience as they watched the teams scrambling and the real-time scoreboard display.

PagerDuty Challenge Cup Final Results Announcement

When the winning team was announced, a big round of applause was given to all teams for their efforts. The operating staff who played the role of CTO also offered words of praise for the teams' hard work, and the venue was filled with a warm atmosphere.

🥇 Winner: "CTO ni Anmin wo" team (NEC Networks & System Integration Corporation)

"We were able to achieve victory by leveraging the knowledge and teamwork of our team members. We believe we were highly evaluated for embodying more practical incident response using PagerDuty in the main competition, actively utilizing the status update and post-mortem functions that we couldn't fully use in the preliminaries. Through the competition, we realized the importance of information sharing and role division with the team and stakeholders, in addition to technical skills. We believe that coordinating with each member, especially in reporting and adjusting the situation to stakeholders including the challenging CTO, led to this result. We want to apply this experience to our future work and contribute to providing even better services."

(Mr. Kazuki Mori, Mr. Taiga Kimura, Mr. Taisei Taguchi, Platform Operations Department, Office Solutions Business Division, DX Solutions Business Headquarters)

🥈 2nd place: "99x" team