This is third article of a three part series about the latest improvements to PagerDuty.  Be sure to check out Part 1 and Part 2.

One of the biggest challenges in creating PagerDuty was determining how to get the wide variety of monitoring systems out there and PagerDuty to talk to each other.  Up until now, we’ve relied on email to be the common interface between monitoring tools and PagerDuty; however, there’s a limit to the amount of information we can extract from free-text messages.  We now offer an API that can be used to programmatically send monitoring events to PD, but we recognize that this can be a bit of a chore to set up with your favorite monitoring tool.

The ideal scenario would be if your monitoring tools were PagerDuty-aware: if they “just knew” about your PagerDuty account and could seamlessly send events directly to PagerDuty.  We’re beginning to do just that by building partnerships with the best cloud-based (software-as-as-service) and run-it-yourself monitoring systems.

We’re pleased to announce that Cloudkick is the first monitoring tool to include out-of-the-box integration capability with PagerDuty.  Cloudkick is a recognized leader in cloud-based monitoring.  They offer comprehensive connectivity and host-level monitoring across not only every major cloud provider, but also machines in your own data center via their agent software.  What’s more, Cloudkick’s plugin architecture makes it easy to set up application-level monitoring. Plugins exist for most major server software, but you can easily write new ones for your custom apps.  For a limited time, Cloudkick is offering all PagerDuty customers a 15% discount — see their pricing page for more details.

To learn more about how Cloudkick can help you keep a handle on your systems, take a look at their feature list.

Stay tuned for more partnership announcements — we hope to get out-of-the-box PagerDuty support into every popular monitoring tool over the next few months.