This is first article of a three part series about the latest improvements to PagerDuty. Be sure to check out Part 2 and Part 3.

Today, we are proud to announce a major release for PagerDuty. We are launching not 1, nor 2 but 3 major new features:

• Our new integration API.
• Our new Nagios plugin and Nagios integration guide.
• Our new Cloudkick plugin and Cloudkick integration guide.

This is a lot of news to take in all at once. Thus, we have broken up the annoucement into 3 parts. Part 1, which is the article you’re reading now, will cover the new PagerDuty integration API. Part 2 will cover the new Nagios plugin and corresponding Nagios integration guide. Part 3 will cover integrating PagerDuty with the Cloudkick cloud server monitoring system.

The integration API

The new integration API allows you to add PagerDuty’s advanced alerting functionality to any system that can make an API call. The API provides a simple and powerful interface to PagerDuty and allows you to add phone, SMS and email alerting to your monitoring tools, ticketing systems, and custom software.

The only requirement to integrate PD with your systems is that your tool must be able to make an HTTP API call, or at least invoke a command-line script which then calls our API (Hint: most monitoring tools can do this).

The API in a nutshell

The integration API is very simple. It allows your system to send events to PagerDuty. We support 3 event types:

• Trigger
• Acknowledge
• Resolve

Trigger events should be sent out by your systems when problems occur. They result in the creation of an incident in PagerDuty; once the incident is created, we start alerting the on-call engineer.

Acknowledge events are used to acknowledge incidents (no surprise there). Normally, you’ll ack an incident when you receive the phone call or SMS alert. We’ve added support for the acknowledge event, in case you have a monitoring system (or custom software) that sends out acks.

And finally, resolve events are used to resolve an incident in PagerDuty. This allows your monitoring systems to automatically resolve an incident in PagerDuty when the underlying problem is fixed.

To learn more about the integration API, please take a look at our API documentation here: https://developer.pagerduty.com/documentation/integration/events