PagerDuty Blog

Now You can Invoke PagerDuty Rundeck Actions Within the PagerDuty Slack Integration

Collaboratively diagnose problems to resolve incidents faster.

Last year, we released PagerDuty Rundeck Actions, a PagerDuty add-on product that connects responders to automated diagnostics and remediation for common problems directly in the PagerDuty incident response workflow. After working with our customers and listening to the community, we are excited to announce that PagerDuty Rundeck Actions now integrates with PagerDuty’s Slack integration.

Fusing Automation With Collaboration

With this latest integration, responders now have the ability to deploy automated diagnostics and remediation actions directly from a Slack channel. This eliminates the need to access a service through a terminal and context switch between windows, creating a faster and more efficient way to resolve incidents—while also reducing escalations to specialists.

The days of pulling up multiple windows on your double monitors to address a single problem are no longer. Not only can you communicate incident status to your stakeholders, you can also deploy repair actions from the same window. When an incident occurs, responders can quickly create incident-specific channels within their Slack instance to collaborate with affected teams and stakeholders, run diagnostic steps, and invoke automation to remediate the issue in real time. 

CollabOps in Action

First-line responders and personnel can leverage the connections they built across the IT department (specifically applications and services integrated with PagerDuty + Rundeck) and deploy a chatbot to run the actions for you. Instead of escalating and passing off the problem up the ladder, this integration allows you to drop the incident right into a dedicated channel with the right people for the job to collaborate on a fix. And, while this is all happening, the integration also proactively captures and records the logistics of the incident as it happens, making the documentation process fully transparent and accessible to all stakeholders.

Rundeck Actions: How it Works

With PagerDuty Rundeck Actions, engineers can create and delegate automated actions for tedious and recurring diagnostic procedures to responders, reducing time wasted on repetitive tasks. This also includes automation for common mitigation approaches such as fail-over and other remediation tactics. 

Simple, repeatable cures for known issues can also be triggered without human intervention using event triggers, turning urgent issues into a resolved afterthought. To help responders working in PagerDuty accelerate resolution of incidents, Rundeck Actions connects automated diagnostics and remediation to the incident response workflow. 

Automated Diagnostics are a set of automated actions for production services that your responders can invoke when an incident occurs. Rather than having to escalate to expert specialists who manually run common tests, first responders can safely invoke this automation themselves from within PagerDuty and see responses delivered in real time back to your incident timeline. 

With PagerDuty Rundeck Actions, teams can:

  • Decrease response times up to 30 minutes
  • Distribute subject matter expertise across response teams via Slack
  • Trigger human-assisting and self-healing automation before responders are paged
  • Invoke secure automation behind firewalls and VPCs
  • Deploy automated actions in place of manual procedures
  • Enrich incident documentation for smoother postmortems and reduced operator work

To learn more about how Rundeck Actions can work for you, check out the knowledge base. Additionally, you can contact your account manager or request a demo today.