Installation
PagerDuty is one of many integrations supported by Rootly. With PagerDuty, you can manage and automate on-call contact info, teams, schedules, alerting, and escalation policies. It can serve as a central point for ensuring the right people are notified when incidents happen.
There are a few key features in PagerDuty that work well with Rootly:
- Services are a core feature in PagerDuty that represent an application or component against which you create alerts.
- Self-service contact management allows users to set up profiles in PagerDuty with their contact info where they can be reached when an incident occurs.
- On call schedule management allows those creating on call schedules to schedule team members in an easy to use interface. Those same team members can also be notified when they have an upcoming on-call shift, and they can also create overrides when someone else is covering some or all of their shift.
- Team organization gathers together staff in a logical grouping to make schedule and service management easier.
- Alert escalations are a feature that will automatically escalate unacknowledged alerts, or allow the person being paged to escalate to another engineer should they need assistance.
Rootly serves as a central point for incident coordination, communication, and data collection when things break. It integrates with a number of external services to enhance and automate incident response workflows.
When you are using Rootly with PagerDuty, you can:
- Import PagerDuty services into Rootly Services to provide consistency between the two when using the PagerDuty to Rootly integration.
- Create a Rootly alert when creating an incident in PagerDuty to kick off the incident management process.
- Create a PagerDuty incident when creating an incident in Rootly, which will ensure those listed in the on-call schedule in PagerDuty are notified via their preferred contact methods.
- Resolve a PagerDuty incident right from Rootly.
- Page directly from Slack, if the Slack and Rootly Integration is enabled.
In the following section, we'll show you how to configure the integration between PagerDuty and Rootly.
We recommend you integrating with a service account to make sure the integration doesn't break if a user leaves your company.
Configuring the integration between PagerDuty and Rootly is simple and painless. You will need to be an administrator in Rootly to do so.
Log into PagerDuty with the account you wish to integrate with Rootly.
While logged into Rootly, click the drop down in the upper right corner next to your username. Then click Integrations.
Scopes are tied to the user's permissions. Authenticated users will only be able to read and write to objects that they have access to. We will create a service account user in pagerduty:
On the Integrations screen, scroll down until you find PagerDuty and click Setup.
You will see a screen similar to the one below, where you will find the PagerDuty account where you logged in. The one listed below is a test account we use. Yours will be named differently. Click the blue button with the account you wish to integrate.
On the next screen, click Authorize to allow Rootly to have access to your PagerDuty account.
That's all there is to it! Your integration is complete.
Header: secret: <TOKEN>
You can find the token in Integrations > PagerDuty
Incident management is at the core of how Rootly and PagerDuty work together. Once you've configured your integration, you will want to test the incident creation and management features in Rootly.
To create an incident, do the following:
Towards the upper-right side of any screen in Rootly, locate the Create Incident button and click it.
You will then be presented with the New Incident Details dialog, where you can then begin to add details. At a minimum, you will need to put in a title for the incident. If you don't know the rest of the information, you can always create the incident and come back to edit it after the fact to add more details.
Once you are done filling in the details, click Create Incident.
You will be taken to a screen with all of the current details of the incident.
Now you can escalate the incident to the desired Pagerduty service:
As you can see from the incident timeline, once the incident was created, it was also created for PagerDuty. If you login to PagerDuty, and click on Incidents in the upper left navigation bar, you will see the incident created there as well.
To resolve an incident in Rootly, click the Mark as Mitigated button on the incident details screen.
You will be presented with a dialog to explain any actions taken to mitigate the incident. Once you've filled it out, click the Mark as Mitigated button once more.
Once all of the followup for the incident has been done, you can resolve it through Rootly by clicking the Mark as Resolved button.
You will be presented with a dialog where you can enter any additional details about the incident resolution. Once completed, click the Mark as Resolved button once more.
If you return to the PagerDuty Incidents screen, and click on Resolved, you will see the incident has now been resolved in PagerDuty as well.
Q: PagerDuty has some incident management capabilities, how is this different?
A: When it comes to incident management capabilities, there is some overlap between Rootly and PagerDuty. However, Rootly provides a more complete and centralized incident management platform designed to work with the alerting capabilities of PagerDuty, or other similar alerting services such as OpsGenie or VictorOps.
Q: Should I keep paying for PagerDuty or does Rootly replace it?
A: PagerDuty provides excellent on call scheduling management, and can act as an enhancement to the incident management capabilities in Rootly. They work best together, but it isn't strictly necessary to use PagerDuty if you would prefer a different on-call management solution.
Q: I don't use PagerDuty, is that okay?
A: You don't need to use PagerDuty if you don't want it. We do recommend using some kind of on-call management solution such as VictorOps or OpsGenie, if PagerDuty doesn't meet your requirements for those functions.
Q: I'm getting a Failed to authenticate. Reason: Invalid Credentials message when I try to authenticate my PagerDuty account. What is happening?
A: Chances are you are trying to authenticate with a Trial PagerDuty account that has expired. Check your PD account to make sure it is still active. If that's not the case, contact us at support@rootly.com or use the lower right chat widget to get connected with an engineer.
Q: Where can I get more help if I need it with Rootly or other integrations?
A: If you need help or more information about this integration, please contact support@rootly.com or use the lower right chat widget to get connected with an engineer.
