Syncing PagerDuty Schedules to Slack Groups

Engineers at Honeycomb found themselves facing a persistent issue with outdated Slack aliases that complicated incident management during on-call rotations. This problem arose because some teams shared pager rotations without hand-off meetings, causing disruptions in communication when incident management tools like Jeli and PagerDuty failed to invite the correct individuals to incident channels. Despite the existence of potential solutions, many were complex and costly, requiring infrastructure that Honeycomb preferred to avoid. Instead, a more straightforward approach was devised by creating a script that synchronized on-call schedules using PagerDuty and Slack APIs, which was then automated to run hourly via a Kubernetes cronjob. This small yet impactful solution was met with enthusiasm from the engineering team, highlighting the importance of addressing even minor operational frictions. The success of this initiative prompted the decision to open-source the script, allowing other organizations facing similar challenges to benefit from the streamlined process without incurring additional costs.