pdsync

pdsync is a tool to synchronize on-call schedules in PagerDuty into third-party systems.

Right now, the only supported target is Slack: given a list of PageDuty schedules, a Slack channel, and a template, pdsync will periodically poll the on-call personnel on the schedules and update the Slack channel's topic. The template accepts a variable that matches a PageDuty schedule name to fill in the corresponding on-call Slack handles. Additionally, pre-existing user groups can be updated automatically to always point to the current on-call personnel.

How-to

You will need to create a Slack app with the following scopes:

Scope	Optional	Used for
users:read	no
users:read.email	yes	support mapping users by email address
channels:join	yes	joining public channels automatically
channels:read	yes	managing topics (public channels)
channels:manage	yes	managing topics (public channels)
groups:read	yes	managing topics (private channels)
groups:write	yes	managing topics (private channels)
usergroups:read	yes	managing user groups
usergroups:write	yes	managing user groups

For private channels and when the channels:join scope is not assigned, the Slack app needs to be joined to the target channel manually. (One easy to do this is to select the app from a channel where it already exists and use the context menu to add it to another channel.)

Support for private channels also needs the --include-private-channels flag to be explicitly set.

Next up, one or more slack syncs must be configured, preferrably through a YAML configuration file. Here is an example file:

slackSyncs:
    # name must be unique across all given syncs
  - name: team-awesome
    schedules:
      # a schedule can be given by name
    - name: Awesome-Primary
      # a schedule may optionally have one or more user groups that get updated with the on-call personnel
      userGroups:
      # choose one of `id`, `name`, or `handle` to reference a pre-existing user group
      - name: Team Awesome On-call (all)
      - handle: team-awesome-on-call-primary
      # alternatively, the schedule can be given by ID (the name is assumed to be Awesome-Secondary and referenced in the template below)
    - id: D34DB33F
      userGroups:
        # the first user group is also defined in the primary schedule above
      - name: Team Awesome On-call (all)
      - handle: team-awesome-on-call-secondary
    channel:
      name: awesome
      # a channel can also be provided by ID:
      # id: 1A3F8FGJ

      # The on-call Slack user variables are named after the schedule names.
      # Note how it is called ".AwesomePrimary" and not ".Awesome-Primary" because Go
      # template variables support alphanumeric characters only, so pdsync
      # strips off all illegal characters.
    template: |-
      primary on-call: <@{{.AwesomePrimary}}> (Slack handle: @team-awesome-on-call-primary)
      secondary on-call: <@{{.AwesomeSecondary}}> (Slack handle: @team-awesome-on-call-secondary)

      reach out to both primary and secondary via @team-awesome-on-call

    # Set to true to prevent tagging users (useful for testing purposes)
    pretendUsers: false
    # Set to true to skip updating the Slack channel topic
    dryRun: false
    # Set to true to exit with an error when any sync fails
    # (should not need to be set since reasonable default is chosen based on whether daemon mode is used)
    failFast: false

Now pdsync can be started like the following:

pdsync --config config.example.yaml

This will update the topic of the awesome Slack channel mentioning the primary and secondary on-call Slack handles. The template variables match the PagerDuty schedule names.

Note: Go template variables take alphanumeric names only. pdsync exposes channel names without unsupported characters in the template variables, which is why you will need to use {{.AwesomePrimary}} (as opposed to {{.Awesome-Primary}}) in the example above.

The example will also update three Slack user groups to make it easy to ping the current primary, secondary, and all on-call personnel.

For simple cases and testing purposes, it is also possible to specify a single slack sync through CLI parameters:

pdsync --schedule 'name=Awesome-Primary;userGroup=handle=team-awesome-oncall-primary' --schedule='id=D34DB33F;userGroup=name=Team Awesome On-call Secondary' --channel-name awesome --template 'primary on-call: <@{{.AwesomePrimary}}> secondary on-call: <@{{.AwesomeSecondary}}>'

The --schedule flag consists of a series of the following key/value pairs:

• id=<schedule reference>: the ID of a PagerDuty schedule (mutually exclusive with name= below)
• name=<schedule reference>: the name of a PagerDuty schedule (mutually exclusive with id= above)
• userGroup=<key identifier>=<user group reference>: the id, name, or handle (i.e., the <key identifier>) of a user group; can be repeated to reference multiple user groups

Add --dry-run to turn all mutating API requests into no-ops.

Run the tool with --help for details.

Auto-formatting caveat

Slack requires certain "interactive" parts of a message to be formatted particularly in order to be presented correctly (e.g., to make URLs clickable). Conveniently (for humans), the Slack backend automatically formats topic content as it is being sent to the API. However, for pdsync this is problematic since it needs to be able to determine reliably if a topic has changed (to avoid triggering unncessary and observable topic updates), but it cannot do so if what is being submitted to the API is different from what is being returned. For instance, a topic text such as "go to example.com for help" sent to the Slack API would read back as something like "go to <http://example.com|example.com> for help", thereby breaking any delta check.

The same holds for text that needs to be escaped, such as the & (ampersand) character.

The recommended way to deal with this problem is to only use formatted / escaped text parts in the pdsync configuration. The relevant Slack documentation has a more complete list on what this applies to; some commonly used and auto-formatted text pieces are the following:

• URLs: https://example.com -> <https://example.com>
• & (ampersand): & -> &

Certain Slack modules that involve formatting of some sort allow to disable auto-formatting. Unfortunately, topic content does not seem to be part of that group.

status

This tool is newish, has too few tests, and is possibly buggy. However, it did get quite some mileage already.

All things considered, use it at your own risk -- but do provide feedback.