Question about Creating Alert Events vs Incidents

#1

Hello, I have a question about the reccomended way to create Alerts and Incidents in a monitoring application.

While reading https://developer.pagerduty.com/docs/ZG9jOjExMDI5NTgw-events-api-v2-overview it says " Previously, the Events API was used to create PagerDuty incidents from ticketing systems and various other collaboration tools. Today, we recommend using the synchronous Incidents API for this purpose."

When I go to the documentation for the incidents api (https://developer.pagerduty.com/docs/ZG9jOjExMDI5NTY0-incident-creation-api) I also find
" With this API, one can connect to a PagerDuty account and create or edit incidents on that account. This API is not to be used for connecting your monitoring tools to send events to PagerDuty; for that, use the"

I am trying to interpret what this means in regards to how I should proceed with creating my Alert Event inside my monitoring tool. Should I create the original incident with the incidents API then add an Alert Event with the events API afterwards? Is doing this supported? Or should I allow the Events API to create the alert event along with the incident at the same time?

Thank you.

#2

Spencer - you’ll want to send all events/alerts from your monitoring tool to our Events API v2. This provides you with an opportunity to manage incoming events/alerts using our event rulesets/rules first (suppression, enrichment, normalization, remediation, etc), and then determine which events/alerts should be routed to a service for an additional level of event/alert rule evaluation (fine-grained suppression, enrichment, etc) and ultimately event/alert deduplication, grouping, and the incident lifecycle.

If you create incidents directly, you won’t be able to use all of these great features! Once the incident is created, you can use the REST (Incidents) API to do any other updates on the incident you may need to do (acknowledge, add notes, run response play, resolve, etc).

Hope this helps!