Has anyone experienced flakiness with debug mode?

#1

I just finished my first custom event transformer, and to be honest it was a pretty unpleasant experience mainly because I found debug mode to be really flaky. It would start out working, but eventually just stop. I would have a syntax error in my transformer but the result would just be… nothing. This left me flying completely blind for debugging purposes, only knowing I’d found the issue when my transformer started creating alerts again.

I’m fairly new to PagerDuty, so it could be that I’m missing something. I was working in a new service using default settings - is it possible that the debug alarms could have been somehow hidden somewhere? Is there any kind of log I could check for clues?

If anyone can offer troubleshooting advice, or confirmation that debug mode has been flaky for them too, it would be greatly appreciated.

#2

Yes, it is very challenging to debug our standard “Custom Event Transformer” feature. Best bet is to start out by sending the full raw payload across to the PagerDuty event/incident so you can see it all in the UI. Due to some recent changes, you should also have the role of Admin or higher so you can see Alerts that have been suppressed within the Alerts tab.

From there, it’s an iterative, chunk by chunk process of incrementally adding code to extract, transform and map incoming event data into the desired PagerDuty Event fields until you’ve got the payload you want. Then at the end, you’ll add the logic that returns that event to PagerDuty to create the alert and incident.

The new “Application Event Transformer” feature available via the “Developer Mode” has introduced an improved code writing environment that includes additional formatting, linting and javascript error reporting. Not perfect yet, but much improved.

Feel free to reach out to me direct if you need some more help!

Doug

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