PagerBot

Pagerbot is a bot that makes managing PagerDuty on-call schedules easier. It currently supports IRC and Slack, and can be easily deployed to Heroku.

Pagerbot uses Chronic for natural language date and time parsing.

Sample

Usage

The easiest way to get started is to use the Heroku button above to launch an admin interface for pagerbot, where you need to fill out a few API keys and choose commands (plugins) that pagerbot knows about and responds to.

Going through the admin page shouldn’t take much longer than 8 minutes. The admin page also contains detailed information on how to make the bot join your channel.

To start up the admin interface again, rescale the dynos to have a single web worker and remove the DEPLOYED config variable in heroku dashboard.

Plugins

Currently pagerbot supports the following commands (prefix all of them with bot name and a colon, e.g. pagerbot:):

Plugin	Example	Notes
-	help	Short list of all commands pagerbot knows.
-	manual	Show in-depth explanation about each command.
-	who is on primary now?	Find out who is on a specific schedule at time.
-	when am I on product?	Find out who is on a specific schedule at time.
Schedule override	put me on triage for 30 minutes	Overrides the current schedule for a duration.
Schedule override	put carl on primary from 3 AM until 4 AM August 24th
Call	call sys because admin server is acting funky	Send email to <teamname><email-suffix>, where email-suffix is set in admin.
Call person	get andrew because we need to credential people	Triggers an pagerduty issue for person.
Switch shift	put amy on triage during carl's shift on August 11th	Take over a single shift on a specific day.
Reload	reload	Load user and schedule changes from pagerduty.
Add Alias	alias [email protected] as karl	Add a new alias for person or schedule.

Local development

Easiest way to run pagerbot locally is via docker and docker-compose.

# Running tests
docker-compose run pagerbot rake test

# Opening the admin interface to configure the bot. Accessible via `localhost:4567`
# The interface will auto-reload on file changes (though html/javascript may be cached).
docker-compose up --build pagerbot-admin

# Run the bot itself locally
docker-compose up --build pagerbot

Deploying via heroku

To deploy it to heroku, git clone, create a heroku app and push to launch it.

heroku create
heroku addons:add mongolab:sandbox
heroku addons:add papertrail
git push heroku master

For developing new capabilities, PagerDuty has two different APIs:

• The Integration API is a high-availability endpoint for triggering and updating incidents.
• The REST API provides CRUD for most PagerDuty account objects, such as users, schedules, escalation policies, etc

FAQ

Heroku is asking for my credit card! Do I need to pay for this?

No, running your own pagerbot is free! This is a requirement of the free MongoDB add-on. See the verification policy of Heroku.

How can I secure the admin interface?

Set the enviroment variable called PROTECT_ADMIN to be your desired password. Instructions for changing an enviroment variable are listed in the next FAQ.

When using the admin interface, enter the same password, the username can be arbitrary.

How can I relaunch the admin interface?

Via web:

• Log into heroku and navigate to your application.
• If it’s a slackbot: go to settings and remove DEPLOYED config variable.
• If it’s an irc bot: rescale your application to have 1 web worker and 0 irc workers.

Via command line:

• If it’s a slackbot: heroku config:set DEPLOYED=false
• If it’s an irc bot: heroku ps:scale web=1 irc=0