pagerduty-tools

Tools to work around limitations in the PagerDuty API. As an example use, here are two Campfire updates from these scripts that set the room topic to the current on-call rotation, and then report on the incidents and alerts from the previous rotation:

campfire example

IMPORTANT: Status

Several changes to PagerDuty's site have broken parts of these tools. I'm currently working on repairing them and on making the tools into a gem. Status as of this writing is that the bin/pagerduty_oncall.rb script is working and the others are not. The gem builds and installs.

Installing

Ruby 1.8.7 or later is required.

First, clone the GitHub repo:

$ git clone git://github.com/precipice/pagerduty-tools.git

If you don't already have Bundler installed, do that now:

$ gem install bundler

Then install required gems via Bundler:

$ bundle install

The scripts log into the PagerDuty site when first run. Your email address will be used to find associated PagerDuty accounts, and you can choose the account you want to report on. After the first run, a login cookie is kept in ~/.pagerduty-cookies to allow future runs to be automatic (e.g., from cron).

Campfire Support

If you would like to have PagerDuty reports sent to your Campfire room, create a "PagerDuty" user in your Campfire account, and then add a configuration file at ~/.pagerduty-campfire.yaml containing the following:

site:  https://example.campfirenow.com
room:  99999
token: abababababababababababababababababababab

with the values changed to match your configuration. I'd recommend running:

$ chmod 0600 ~/.pagerduty-campfire.yaml

after creating the file. See the documentation for each script for how to send output to Campfire.

Tip: you can use PagerDuty's Twitter icon as a profile icon for your Campfire PagerDuty account. This isn't necessary, but it makes the PagerDuty message more recognizable and nicer.

Limitations

The rotation-report.rb script works well for weekly rotations with no exceptions set. It might work well for daily rotations (comparing to the same day one week ago), but hasn't been tested for that; and it fails completely if any of the weeks compared have an exception set. If you set an exception, you can work around this limitation using the --start-time and --end-time options to explicitly set the report date range.
Login and other errors from PagerDuty's site are not parsed or reported.

oncall.rb

The oncall.rb script reports who is currently on call for your PagerDuty account. Invoked with no arguments, it will list all on-call levels (1..n). If one or more levels are given as arguments, it will only list those levels.

If the on call level has an associated on-call rotation, the name of that rotation is used in the output. Otherwise, a generic Level <#> format is used.

You can invoke oncall.rb with a -t or --campfire-topic option, and the output of the script will be set as the topic for the configured room (see Campfire Support, above). We do this out of cron right after the rotation turns over to a new assignment.

oncall.rb defaults to showing the first escalation policy, but if you have multiple ones and want to show a specific one, you can invoke it with -p or --policy to specify which one to use.

Calling the script with -h or --help will display some help.

Examples

$ ./oncall.rb
Hotseat: John Henry, Hotseat Backup: Lisa Limon, Level 3: Steven Sanders

$ ./oncall.rb 1 2
Hotseat: John Henry, Hotseat Backup: Lisa Limon

$ ./oncall.rb --campfire-topic 1 2
[No shell output, but the configured Campfire room's topic becomes:
"Hotseat: John Henry, Hotseat Backup: Lisa Limon"]

rotation-report.rb

The rotation-report.rb script generates an automatic "end of shift" report to show what happened over the course of a rotation. It measures how many incidents occurred, shows who resolved them, and shows how many alerts people got (including a breakout of after-midnight alerts, which we all must strive to eradicate!). Also, it lists the top five causes for alerts during the rotation, and compares the counts to the same period one week earlier.

Here's an example:

Rotation report for February 23 - March 02:
  19 incidents (-9% vs. last week)

Resolutions:
  John Henry: 8, George Harrison: 4, Scott Brinkley: 4, Jason Neeson: 2, [Automatic]: 1

SMS/Phone Alerts (62 total, +77% vs. last week; 6 after midnight, -53% vs. last week):
  John Henry: 44, George Harrison: 10, Jason Neeson: 4, Scott Brinkley: 4

Top triggers:
  6 'Pingdom: DOWN alert: example-health (www.example.com) is DOWN' (-14% vs. last week)
  5 'Pingdom: DOWN alert: sg-health (sg.example.com) is DOWN' (no occurrences last week)
  4 'Nagios: vip-api - check_api_lag' (+300% vs. last week)
  1 'Nagios: vip-redisapi - check_live_redis_lag' (-66% vs. last week)
  1 'Pingdom: DOWN alert: client-nike (www.nike.com) is DOWN' (no occurrences last week)

By default the script will report on the most recently-completed rotation. However, you can use the -a|--rotations-ago COUNT option to specify how far back in history you want to go. Or, you can use -s|--start-time DATETIME and -e|--end-time DATETIME (giving the date in ISO 8601 date and time format, e.g. "2011-03-02T14:00:00-05:00") to set a specific range for the report.

Calling rotation-report.rb with a -m|--campfire-message argument will cause the rotation report to be pasted into the configured Campfire room. (See Campfire Support, above, for information about setting this up.)

Calling the script with -h or --help will display some help.

alerts-by-day.rb

This script is being revised and doesn't work with the rest of the package yet.

Contributions

Pull requests welcome. There are no tests or specs yet, so hey, contributing couldn't be easier.

Thanks to the following people for contributions!