Kayako 5 Integration Guide

Kayako is simple customer service software that scales with your business. Kayako makes it easy to deliver an unrivaled customer support experience. This guide will walk you through how to integrate Kayako with PagerDuty, allowing your staff to receive notifications from PagerDuty when a support ticket is created or updated in Kayako.  You can also set up optional email parsing rules to allow Kayako to resolve PagerDuty incidents when your Kayako tickets are closed; steps to configure this will also be outlined in this guide.

NOTE: This guide is for version 5 of Kayako. If you need the guide for version 4, click here.

If you have any trouble setting up your integration, please contact us.

In PagerDuty

  1. From the Configuration menu, select Services.
  2. On your Services page:If you are creating a new service for your integration, click +Add New Service.

    If you are adding your integration to an existing service, click the name of the service you want to add the integration to. Then click the Integrations tab and click the +New Integration button.

    RS-Add-New-Service

    RS-Add-Integration-Existing-Service

  3. Select your app from the Integration Type menu and enter an Integration Name.

    If you are creating a new service for your integration, in General Settings, enter a Name for your new service. Then, in Incident Settings, specify the Escalation Policy, Notification Urgency, and Incident Behavior for your new service.

  4. Click the Add Service or Add Integration button to save your new integration. You will be redirected to the Integrations page for your service.RS-Integration-Settings
  5. Copy the Integration Email for your new integration: RS_email_pd_3

In Kayako

  1. Visit your Kayako admin area (http://yoursubdomain.kayako.com/admin) click Triggers, then New trigger. You can also click the name of one of your existing triggers if you would like to configure these to send to PagerDuty.
  2. Give your trigger a title, make sure under Rule settings you have opted to Any. You can choose/combine the criteria which work best for your team, but for this example we’ll use Conversation Update Event: Conversation Update Event Type> equal to > New conversation created to trigger a PagerDuty incident whenever there is a new conversation created in our Kayako platform.

  3. Once you’ve filled in your criteria in the conditions section, its time to move to Actions section. From the list of available actions, select Notification: Email a user. In the Select an option or type to search, type the PagerDuty service email address. Write your email subject under the Subject text area that will help you identify in PagerDuty what has happened (Kayako will automatically send over the ticket number). In the Message text area, define your message that you wish to trigger to PagerDuty.

    NOTE: Using placeholders in your notifications is a great way to makes sure even your automated messages feel personal.

  4. To test, create a new support conversation in your Kayako platform. You’ll see a new incident created in your PagerDuty service with the conversation number, subject that you set, and customer’s subject line in the Details summary, and more information about the support ticket details and requester in the email body when you drill down into the incident.

Configuring Kayako to resolve PagerDuty incidents

  1. If you would like Kayako to resolve PagerDuty incidents based on different criteria (for example, when a ticket is closed), you can follow the same steps as the In Kayako section above, however, you’ll select different criteria and write a different Subject in your Trigger notification rule. We’re using Conversation:Status >Changed to > Completed for criteria in the example below, and Kayako ticket closed as my email subject prefix. The rule should send to the same integration email address as well.


  2. In PagerDuty, you will need to configure email parsing rules to determine when an incident can be triggered and resolved in your Kayako service. Navigate to your service page by clicking Configuration, then Services, and selecting your Kayako service from the list, then click the settings cog and Edit to open the service’s edit view. Your rules will vary based on the notification rules you created in Kayako, but in the example below, incidents are triggered if the email subject contains the trigger email subject prefix (Kayako ticket created) and resolved if the email subject contains the closed ticket email subject prefix (Kayako ticket closed). Kayako sends the ticket numbers in the format [!1]:, so we set the Incident Key to match all text between [ and ]: in the email subject. For ticket #1, this means the incident key will be pulled as !1.2

  3. To test, create a new ticket in your Kayako helpdesk. You’ll see a new incident in PagerDuty created as in Step 5 of the In Kayako section of this guide, and in the incident details, you’ll see the incident key field display information matching the incident key rules you created. Then, in Kayako, change the status of the same support ticket to Closed. You’ll see your PagerDuty incident auto-resolve, and a message appear in the Incident Log stating that the incident was Resolved by email, with a message subject matching your Kayako closed notification rule prefix.

FAQ

Can PagerDuty close or comment on tickets in Kayako?

At this time, no. If you would like to see a bidirectional integration made possible in the future, please contact support to submit this request.

Can I customize the criteria by which Kayako will trigger and resolve events in PagerDuty, and customize the information in the email sent to PagerDuty by Kayako?

Yes. You can read more about configuring Notification Rules, criteria, and the templates which determine the email body in Kayako’s knowledgebase here.

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