How to be notified when PD outgoing numbers change?

I downloaded the vCard with PagerDuty’s outgoing numbers about a year ago. This has identified PD calls very reliably, and is necessary for me to override Do Not Disturb mode on my phone.

Today I was paged by a new number that wasn’t recognized by my phone. I downloaded the latest vCard, and it does include the number I was called from.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/pdpartner/PagerDuty+Outgoing+Numbers.vcf

How can I be notified when the vCard changes, so I can make sure I recognize PD calls?

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Hi Robin,

Currently we don’t offer notification of when this vCard file is updated. I would recommend making it a habit of downloading the latest version regularly but having said this, I would be happy to pass your feedback along so it may be included as a new feature in something like the mobile app.

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Just to second this request, our iPhone users critically rely on this functionality and the recent addition of new phone numbers did cause some issues for us. I call out our iPhone users because this is not an issue on Android (shameless plug) where the app can override the system volume settings and DND mode.

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Hi Christopher,

Thank you for your added input here. Apologies for any issues this may have caused you and your iPhone users too.

We historically have not made many updates to our vCard that required users to be updated about but did make a change recently where new numbers were added that could be used to send Phone notifications. We had elected to only email Account Owners of this change but have received a good amount of feedback about not having reached out to a wider audience if this is to happen again. I will be adding this thread as a vote for that request.

In the meantime, we have also begun logging all updates made to our vCard in this new section of our Knowledge Base just above where it is available to download:

Voicing my opinion here too, I’m an iPhone user and I also missed a pager last night because of this issue. Since you don’t have any other options for iOS users to get notifications when DND is activated other than relying on phone calls, you definitely need a better way to reach your users about changes in the vcard.

Thanks for that additional feedback. Here is a post from our mobile team which provides a bit more background on this:

/forum/t/iphone-app-bypass-dnd-mode/1815/17

One of the few things I liked that VictorOps had for the iOS app was a vCard built into it … that way if it updated I could just add/update the contact for reasons described above

A link to the vCard from within the iOS app would be awesome

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Thanks for the feedback, Dan! Leena from the mobile team here. Having the vCard available in our mobile apps is definitely on our radar, so we appreciate your input!

Would PD consider offering a simple RSS feed that we could use to get notified when content changes on https://support.pagerduty.com/docs/notification-phone-numbers (like the date under https://support.pagerduty.com/docs/notification-phone-numbers#section-latest-vcard-update)?

Hi J-Lo,

We’re reviewing all options to ensure users gain easy access to any updates to the vCard including an RSS feed.

If you have any other suggestions, we’re happy to include them in our discussions!

Has there been any progress made towards a solution? This just happened to me too.

Hi Dustin,
Leena from the mobile team here. Thanks for reaching out and for your patience as we resolve this. We’re actively working towards the solution right now and we hope to have it complete and available for your use in November. The method we’re implementing will have the mobile apps automatically keep the vCard up to date, so be sure to update your mobile app. We’ll make sure to keep you folks posted here when it’s ready!

Until then, you can manually download the vCard from our Knowledge Base here to make sure you have the up to date version. You would also need to periodically check to see if it has been updated, and if so, you’ll need to download it again.

Thanks, and as always, we appreciate your input!

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Hey everybody! Leena here checking in again with some good news.

We’ve just released version 5.72 of both of our mobile apps, which include functionality to download the vCard from the app, which we can then manage and keep up to date for you! You can download the vCard by going to Settings in the app where you’ll find the option to “Update PagerDuty Contact Card”.

Please note that you’ll need to give the app permission to access your contacts. Don’t worry, We will not send messages, calls, or notifications to any contact within your contacts list. We will not use this permission for marketing, data gathering, or for research purposes. We will only use this access to save the vCard and update it as it changes.

So, go ahead and download the latest version of the app! I recommend always staying up to date with the latest and greatest version :slight_smile:

Thanks!

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We’ve just released version 5.72 of both of our mobile apps, which include functionality to download the vCard from the app, which we can then manage and keep up to date for you! You can download the vCard by going to Settings in the app where you’ll find the option to “Update PagerDuty Contact Card”.

Does this mean after you have chosen “Update PagerDuty Contact Card” once further updates will be applied without user interaction, or should we still click that button on a semi-regular basis to make sure latest updates are applied?

Any idea why this functionality might not be working for me? I checked iOS settings, and have confirmed that I successfully granted Contacts permissions to the PagerDuty app.

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Hey Theo,

Steve from the mobile team here. Currently the behaviour is that after you have chosen “Update PagerDuty Contact Card” once, every time you launch the app afterwards, the app will update your PagerDuty Contact Card (if there are any changes to be applied) in the background without user interaction. You will not need to tap that button again after the first time.

Cheers,
Steve

Hi Jacob,

We are working on a fix for this which should be available in our next app update. Our apologies for the inconvenience here.

In the meantime, as a workaround, you can change your Default Contacts account to iCloud or Local from the Settings > Contacts section of iOS, and then try to update the PagerDuty Contact Card from the app again, and it should work. Please note that changing this means your contacts will be saved to either iCloud or Local on the device.

Feel free to let us know if you have any questions about the above!

Cheers,
Steve