Help Adding Links to an Incident or Alert

#1

Hello everyone.

I am trying to figure a way to add information to incidents based on the service.

For example, we have a Tier 1 group that needs to look at the data first then escalate from there. I want to be able to link incidents back to a knowledge base so that even the newest members of that team are able to work with the alarm and know what to do.

I tried to make a custom extension but that seems to just do a webhook on demand. I also looked at integrations but that also only seems for posting out.

Is there a way to add a URL to a notification for users to check a knowledge base?

#2

Hi Cameron,

Would adding a Note be an acceptable solution?

I’m not sure if it would work in your case, but there’s also the option to include links in the trigger event:

https://v2.developer.pagerduty.com/docs/send-an-event-events-api-v2

#3

Hello thanks for the reply. I don’t think adding a note would work as that would be manual and not something people would see. I would like something in the alert itself but it has to be from multiple sources so not sure how to integrate that with several tools. I am looking for something that allows me to basically point to a link in an alert based off of service. So say I have PagerDuty to DataDog and I have a DD service, let’s say RabbitMQ, I would want the DD RabbitMQ service to have a link to a Wiki page with a playbook for those alerts. Then say I have a different DD service like DD MSMQ, where I provide a different link.

#4

I am also looking for the same feature. Can/does a service provide a simple way to attach helpful links to any incidents that occur for that service? The incident template definitely has a Links section. Is there a way to customize the contents of that section?

#5

Hi Mark,

There isn’t currently a way to include custom text or links for all incidents triggered on a service, but you may be able to configure this in your monitoring tool.
Here is a link to our docs:

https://v2.developer.pagerduty.com/docs/send-an-event-events-api-v2

Beyond this, we can create a feature request to pass on to our product team. If there is anything you would like to include about your use case, you can email it to us at support@pagerduty.com.

#6

Hi @Cam, @mkoch,

You have a couple of options here - we use both:

  1. Use Extensions -> Add-Ons and configure the URL you want to display inline, along with the Service you want to bind it to. Note that you may be stymied by Cross-Site-Scripting protections if you’re using external sites, or Atlassian Confluence, etc. as this loads in an iFrame.
  2. Send a document url along with the alert (e.g. use the Nagios SERVICENOTESURL field, a custom field in Sensu, or a new link if you’re working with the API directly). This won’t unfurl inline, but gets past any CSRF limitations (as you’re opening a separate link in a new tab/window.

If your PagerDuty Services are focussed enough, using the Add-Ons should work beautifully as you can configure your targeted documentation and graphs with every Incident.

What you cannot do, is send a random url in the alert body and have it unfurled inline. Because a lot of our PagerDuty Service implementations are not specific (i.e. we may take 5000 different types of services + hosts in one Service), we can either include a documentation index and a generic set of graphs, or nothing at all, relying on the documentation / graph link to be included in the body of the alert (which we do, so it works for us for now).

Good luck,
@simonfiddaman

1 Like