Improve Pager Duty Call Announcements for CloudWatch Incidents

#1

We are using PagerDuty and have it integrated with several IT Management solutions and are quite happy with it. However, I am looking for a way to improve the phone call announcement for incidents sent from AWS CloudWatch. We have built CloudWatch Alarms from Metrics across several AWS services. When phone calls are received the message is so cryptic, it is hard to understand what the problem is most of the time.

Here is an example of an AWS Cloudwatch Phone Announcement from an AWS Simple Message Queue Metric:

“Maximum ApproximateNumberOfMessagesVisible GreaterThanOrEqualToThreshold 4.0 for QueueName Production”

This is not a human constructed title of a Metric, rather an AWS Cloudwatch Metric detail. I would like to change PagerDuty to announce the Metric Description which I typed in when I constructed the metric:

Alarm Description: “The Production Message Queue has more than 3 messages in it”

Does anyone know how to do this?

Thanks!
Steve

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Expose CloudWatch Service Integration Alert Name Configuration in the API
#2

Hello! Notifications can’t be customized in PagerDuty, but I’d be happy to submit a feature request for you about adding that functionality to the platform. You’ve already laid out your use-case, so all I need is the go-ahead from you to send it along.

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#3

Yes please do so. Thank you for getting back to me.

Best Regards,
Steven

#4

We will go ahead and submit your feedback to our Product team. Let us know if you have any additional feedback!

#5

+1

This would be great! Any updates on this or any place we can track its progress?

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#6

+1
Is there any update on this? We’re getting some very unhelpful “Maximum EnvironmentHealth GreaterThanOrEqualToThreshold 25.0” messages from our alerts.

My two cents as a quick solution would be that it would make more sense to use the ‘Description’ of the Cloudwatch alert as the default title rather than the condition that is being triggered. Then you wouldn’t need any configuration in PagerDuty, you could just set the description in Cloudwatch. From what I’ve seen there aren’t that many alerts where the condition is actually human readable.

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#7

+1, this would greatly help identify root cause from the initial title a lot quicker. I agree with the comment above, letting Description be part of the title would be a quick fix.

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