Alert your team about incidents with PagerDuty

Overview

When an incident occurs, Appwarden notifies team members via your connected Discord server or Slack channel. However, it is often preferable to notify team members by more immediate channels, such as text messages or phone calls.

Appwarden integrates with PagerDuty to improve incident awareness by contacting team members via text and phone in addition to Discord or Slack notifications. This guide will walk you through the process of setting up PagerDuty and integrating it with Appwarden.

PagerDuty is free for accounts with up to 5 team members. We highly recommend using PagerDuty to ensure your security personnel are promptly notified of incidents.

Set up PagerDuty

To configure your PagerDuty integration:

1. Sign in to the Appwarden dashboard
2. Navigate to Settings > Integrations
3. Find the PagerDuty integration card

In the next few sections, we will walk you through how to populate your PagerDuty integration settings.

Create a service

To set up PagerDuty, log in to your PagerDuty account and navigate to Services > Service Directory > New Service and create a service. This service is used by PagerDuty to categorize incidents within the PagerDuty dashboard. To create the service:

1. In the first step, assign a name (e.g. Appwarden or Infrastructure).
2. In the second step, select an escalation policy.
3. In the third step, select the Events API V2 integration.

When you’re done, click Create Service.

This guide does not cover configuring contact information and on-call rotations for your PagerDuty service. For more information, see the PagerDuty documentation.

Set your service name

In your PagerDuty integration settings in the Appwarden dashboard, add the name of your newly created service to the Service Name field.

Set your integration key

In PagerDuty, navigate to Services > Service Directory. Then, click on your newly created service, click the Integrations tab, and click the Settings gear on the Events API V2 card. Finally, on the next page, copy the Integration Key into the Integration Key field in your PagerDuty integration settings in the Appwarden dashboard.

Set your API key

Navigate to Integrations > API Access Keys and press the Create New API Key button. Without selecting the Read-only API Key option, create a new API key. Finally, copy the API key into the API Key field in your PagerDuty integration settings in the Appwarden dashboard.

Appwarden stores your PagerDuty API key using military-grade AES-GCM encryption. If you need to update your API key, you can do so at any time from the dashboard.

Save your integration settings, and you’re all set! Appwarden will now page your team via PagerDuty when an incident is created.

Test your integration

To test your PagerDuty integration, run a test incident from the Incidents page in the Appwarden dashboard by clicking Run test incident.

If PagerDuty is integrated correctly, you will see a PagerDuty integration message in the incident thread. If you are assigned as the on-call team member in your PagerDuty service, you will receive a phone notification from PagerDuty.

Ensure your devices are set up to always audibly ring for PagerDuty calls to avoid missing critical incident notifications.

For more information on PagerDuty set up, please refer to PagerDuty’s documentation.

If you have any questions or need help setting up PagerDuty, please reach out in our community.