August 2010 Summaries

PagerDuty has introduced significant improvements, including a new API that allows for programmatic integration with various monitoring systems, addressing the limitations of using email as a common interface. The company aims to enhance integration by developing partnerships with leading cloud-based and self-hosted monitoring tools, with Cloudkick being the first to offer out-of-the-box integration with PagerDuty. Cloudkick is renowned for its comprehensive monitoring capabilities across major cloud providers and data centers, featuring a plugin architecture that allows for easy application-level monitoring. As part of their collaboration, Cloudkick is offering a temporary 15% discount to PagerDuty customers. PagerDuty plans to expand these partnerships to include seamless integration with more monitoring tools over the coming months.

PagerDuty has announced a significant update featuring three major new features, detailed across a three-part series. The first part introduces the new integration API, which enables users to incorporate PagerDuty's alerting capabilities into any system capable of making an API call. This API allows systems to send three types of events—Trigger, Acknowledge, and Resolve—to PagerDuty, facilitating the creation, acknowledgment, and resolution of incidents. The integration supports phone, SMS, and email alerts, requiring only that the user's tool can perform an HTTP API call or execute a command-line script to engage with the API. Further details on utilizing this integration API can be found in the provided API documentation.

PagerDuty has introduced a new Nagios API that enhances its integration with Nagios by allowing direct communication of problem, acknowledgment, and recovery messages via HTTPS, eliminating the need for email-based integration. This API enables automatic incident resolution in PagerDuty when Nagios reports a fix, preventing unnecessary alerts after issues are resolved, and it distinguishes between problem and recovery messages to avoid false alarms. Implementing the Nagios API is straightforward, involving the creation of a Nagios service in PagerDuty, a Perl script on the Nagios server, and the addition of a "pseudo-contact" in the Nagios configuration. Future enhancements being considered include PagerDuty sending alerts upon incident resolution and assigning Nagios alerts to different Escalation Policies based on Nagios variables, allowing for more tailored responses.