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PagerDuty’s Slack Integration Makes Real-Time Ops Even Easier

by Andrew Marshall April 24, 2019 | 4 min read

This week, Slack users from around the world will converge along the San Francisco waterfront for the 2019 Slack Frontiers event. Teams of all types and sizes will attend customer and product sessions geared toward helping teams improve and take their ChatOps to the next level. Are you attending Slack Frontiers this week? If yes, swing by the PagerDuty booth to say hello and see our Slack app in action!

Drive Real-Time Operations With PagerDuty and Slack

Many modern ITOps and DevOps teams count on Slack to keep everyone on the same page when things are running smoothly—as well as when they aren’t. Because this need is critical to modern businesses, we’re excited to announce our new Slack integration, which deepens our ongoing partnership with Slack.

With this new integration, Slack can be viewed as a third user interface for PagerDuty, with the other two being our SaaS-based desktop product and mobile app. This integration allows our shared customers to use the functionalities of PagerDuty’s powerful digital operations platform, often without having to leave Slack. This deep connection between our two platforms lets teams work in Slack and/or PagerDuty when needed, without needless toggling between platforms, and automates key elements of each product.

For example, Slack users can do things like reassigning, escalating, or viewing additional incident context for an incident from within Slack itself. Users can also create an incident war room Slack channel from within PagerDuty, with the ability to add users as the situation evolves. The result is a streamlined experience for real-time operations.

For PagerDuty customers, using ChatOps tools like Slack has become a key part of digital operations. “Our teams have dedicated Slack channels for their alerts and PagerDuty is integrated into each of them,” explained Tom Clark, Head of Common Platform at ITV, a leading UK media organization. “So straight away, you can see when there’s a serious problem, you can see when someone acknowledges it, and you can see that it’s being resolved—all in one channel. That means, in terms of recovery, there’s just one log for that particular product.”

“Our teams have dedicated Slack channels for their alerts, and PagerDuty is integrated into each of them. So straight away, you can see when there’s a serious problem, you can see when someone acknowledges it, and you can see that it’s being resolved—all in one channel. That means, in terms of recovery, there’s just one log for that particular product.” – Tom Clark, Head of Common Platform at ITV

Drive real-time ops from Slack

Real-time ops requires teams to work where they are. With this integration, users can run a PagerDuty incident response play from a Slack notification and add responders on-the-fly. Create, reassign, escalate, or gather more context about an incident—all from within Slack.

Drive on-call from Slack

Real-time information may require changes to on-call schedules. This integration enables teams to quickly and easily override PagerDuty schedules, and view up-to-date on-call information and timelines from within Slack.

Create Slack channels from PagerDuty

Whether you call it a “war room,” a “peace hut,” or anything else, you can create a Slack channel and add additional responders when needed—all from within PagerDuty.

Key Features:

  • Slack as a PagerDuty interface. Use PagerDuty’s desktop or mobile interfaces or Slack to manage real-time ops with PagerDuty.
  • Respond your way. Create, reassign, escalate, or run an incident response play, all from within Slack.
  • Loop in additional responders. Add response help directly from a Slack notification.
  • One set of permissions. With the PagerDuty Slack integration, there’s no need to duplicate or rebuild permissions.
  • Rich incident context. Arm responders with relevant incident facts and data points, all visible inside Slack.
  • Learn by bot. Learn how to use Slack integration features via a Slackbot.
  • Integrated war room channels. Create or point to a Slack channel directly from PagerDuty and automatically invite responders to the right channel.
  • Drive postmortems. Capture all discussions and actions in the channel for postmortem reviews.
  • Stay informed about your on-call schedules. View all of your on-call schedules from Slack.

PagerDuty + Slack Session at Frontiers

PagerDuty is excited to join Slack at 3 p.m. on Wednesday, April 24, for the “Anticipating, monitoring and managing incidents via Slack” session. Our VP of Product, Rachel Obstler, will be on a panel of experts to discuss exactly what traits make a team successful when it comes to incident management, and how Slack and PagerDuty work together to help teams accelerate the adoption of those traits.

Ready to get started with the Slack integration for PagerDuty? Slack users can try PagerDuty free for 14 days.