Is it possible to notify via Responder Slack Integration prior to SMS/Email/Call?

#1

I’ve integrated Slack into my PagerDuty Service, and I was hoping to have PagerDuty first notify via Slack Integration prior to attempting to reach out via SMS/Email/Phone.

Since my team could partially manage the incident via slack, it’d be neat to be able to Acknowledge from there, and then trigger the full notification support after a period of time if it’s still unacknowledged.

In RuleSets, I see that there is a “Create Alert, but pause notifications”, but trying that out prevents all incident actions, including Slack messaging.

The goal here is to use slack messaging as a nice low-key way to get incidents on the radar without going to SMS/Phone; is that possible?

#2

Hi Mac. This is an interesting question.

You can do this, but it can be a little confusing, because the notifications rules are attached to the user - everyone on your team manages their notifications themselves.

So when you have a service hooked up to alert in slack, the slack notification goes off immediately, regardless of who is on call. :+1:

Your team could set up their notifications to allow for a delay before additional notifications go out. They’ll do that in their user profiles page on PagerDuty, and they can set different delays for each contact type. I’ve attached a screenshot for example:

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If an incident is acknowledged before the delay times out, no additional notifications will be sent. So if someone is in the slack channel and acks the incident, no one will get an SMS or phone call or push notification to the app or whatever else they choose as their notifications.

You’ll want to make sure you set some good guidelines for the folks on your team, and accept that there then could be a delay in response when folks aren’t watching slack. But the notification delays are a good way to let automation and your ChatOps processes have a first crack at incidents. :smiley:

–mandi

#3

Hi Mandi! Thanks for the response!
I can confirm this works for my purposes.

Does PagerDuty have anything on the roadmap for things like Communication Integrations that would be able to be managed by user notification settings (or Service / Team notification settings, like "Use X integration, then notify via base communication channels (phone/sms/email)?

#4

I haven’t heard that it is, but I’ll add it to our ideas board!
Glad it works for you!