Notification unbundling and customisable e-mails

#1

Hi there, we’re receiving complaints from our users about the way PagerDuty sends out e-mails.

The issue boils down to the irrelevance of the subject line. I know that as a function of PagerDuty notification bundling, it’s considered to be less noisy in a mailbox to have a single e-mail that says “You have 17 TRIGGERED Incidents” than 17 e-mails; the problem is two-fold.

  • We use e-mails from PagerDuty to feed into a Jira service desk for alert viewing, scraping the subject line as the ticket title and the body as contents. “[EXTERNAL] [PagerDuty ALERT] You have 17 TRIGGERED Incidents (10f63)” is utterly useless in that context; nobody is going to investigate that to find out which incidents are relevant.
  • It’s also not helpful to individuals and the way most people read. If you’re getting fifty e-mails a day from various sources, having the actual problem description as the subject allows e-mails to immediately be placed in context. 17 e-mails with each simply adding one more to the number of triggered incidents in the subject line is simply not useful.

The feature request therefore is;

  • Unbundling - a method of sending individual alerts when an incident is triggered. “There are X incidents” is possibly still useful as a daily summary, but not for individual responders.
  • Customisable e-mails. Some form of field based content for subject and body, like “Subject: [PagerDuty] [{service_name}] {incident_title} [{URGENCY}]” might be ideal.

I can see from scouring the forums that both of these items have been requested before, multiple times over several years. I’ve also raised it in support tickets to not much response.

This is beginning to become a critical issue for us, and I receive requests for it from our responders on a daily basis.

#2

Are you using our Jira Service Desk integration? I wonder if that would bypass this and the need for an email at all.

#3

Hello David, I hope you’re doing well.

Thanks for reaching out on this matter. I understand your concerns and, as you mentioned, these have already been submitted as a feature request and are worked accordingly by our Product team. If you’d like to, write us to support@pagerduty.com so we can add your vote to the feature requests.

Kind regards,

#4

Thanks for the responses.

Doug: while theoretically that might resolve the issue with the Jira side, it does nothing for the e-mails that go out to individual responders (in the event of escalation or such).

Agustín: as noted, people have been requesting this as a feature for literally years - one of the tickets I linked dates back to August 2017. Forgive my cynicism, but “already been submitted as a feature request and are worked accordingly by our Product team” followed by no action in half a decade does not in this instance suggest that the request is being taken seriously.