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PagerDuty Agent Integration Guide

The PagerDuty Agent is a helper program for your infrastructure that integrates your monitoring tools with PagerDuty. PagerDuty Agent also includes command line tools to accept events from your monitoring system and a daemon process that handles sending events to PagerDuty. The daemon process manages buffering, retrying, and event throttling. Read more about supported event in the developer documentation Events API v2 Overview.

System Requirements

The PagerDuty Agent is currently available in deb and rpm package formats and supported on the following operating systems:

  • Ubuntu 12.04, 14.04, and 16.04
  • CentOS 6

The Agent does not run on CentOS 5 or lower, as it requires a newer version of Python than the version included with CentOS 5. Please use the Perl-based integration for Nagios or older Python-based integration for Zabbix on older CentOS systems.

The PagerDuty Agent requires Python 2.7 or higher, but Python 3 is recommended. Regardless of version, it is necessary that the Python binary be accessible via python; to verify this, run the following command:

which python

If no Python is found, run the following command to create a symlink:

sudo ln -fs $(which python3) /usr/bin/python

Integration Walkthrough

Create a Generic API Service in PagerDuty

PagerDuty Agent can send events to any technical service via a generic Events API integration. Please read Create a Generic Events API Integration for more information about creating a service with a generic Events API integration.

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Integration Key Requirements

Not all integration types and integration keys are compatible with the Events API. When selecting an integration type, you must select Events API V2 to guarantee compatibility with our API for testing your integration or when using the pd-send command.

Agent Source, Installation and Updates

PagerDuty Agent and its integrations are open source, and can be found on GitHub. We recommend installing PagerDuty Agent from our apt or yum repositories as described below.

After installing PagerDuty Agent, please remember to update agent packages regularly to ensure that you have the latest fixes. Depending on your Linux distribution, you can keep your agent packages up to date with the following steps:

Ubuntu

  1. If you do not already have the apt-transport-https package, please install it first:
sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https
  1. Add the PagerDuty repository to your system:
wget -O - https://packages.pagerduty.com/GPG-KEY-pagerduty | sudo apt-key add -
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb https://packages.pagerduty.com/pdagent deb/" >/etc/apt/sources.list.d/pdagent.list'

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Deprecation Guidance

Please note that apt-key may be deprecated on some newer versions of Ubuntu and Debian. For more information and guidance, please reference the manual page from Debian.

  1. Install (or update) the PagerDuty Agent packages:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pdagent pdagent-integrations

CentOS

Note: The PagerDuty Agent is not compatible with CentOS 5 or lower; installation will not succeed on CentOS 5.

  1. Add the PagerDuty repository to your system:
sudo sh -c 'cat >/etc/yum.repos.d/pdagent.repo <<EOF
[pdagent]
name=PDAgent
baseurl=https://packages.pagerduty.com/pdagent/rpm
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://packages.pagerduty.com/GPG-KEY-RPM-pagerduty
EOF'
  1. Install the PagerDuty Agent packages:
sudo yum install pdagent pdagent-integrations
  1. Update just the Agent the packages:
sudo yum update pdagent pdagent-integrations
  1. Copy the pdagent.service file from /var/lib/pdagent/scripts/pdagent.service to /etc/systemd/system/pdagent.service:
cp /var/lib/pdagent/scripts/pdagent.service /etc/systemd/system/pdagent.service
  1. Reload the systemctl daemon to refresh the systemctl service:
systemctl daemon-reload

Verify the Agent is Running

After installing the Agent, run the following command to start the agent:

systemctl start pdagent.service

You can use the systemctl (for systemd-based systems, like Ubuntu 16.04) or service (for SysV init-based systems, like Ubuntu 14.04) command to start, stop, and check the agent's status.

systemd example:

sudo systemctl start pdagent 
sudo systemctl status pdagent

SysV init example:

sudo service pdagent start
sudo service pdagent status

If the daemon is not running and will not start, check /var/log/pdagent/pdagentd.log for errors.

Send an Event to PagerDuty

Use the command pd-send to send an event to PagerDuty. This command enqueues the event on the local disk. The agent daemon will take care of sending the event to the PagerDuty Events API.

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Stopped Service Limitations

If the pdagentd service is stopped, events will not be sent to PagerDuty until the service is started again.

Use the -h or --help option will return usage information:

$ pd-send --help
usage: pd-send [-h] -k SERVICE_KEY -t {trigger,acknowledge,resolve}
 [-d DESCRIPTION] [-i INCIDENT_KEY] [-f FIELDS]`

`Queue up a trigger, acknowledge or resolve event to PagerDuty.
...

In the example above, SERVICE_KEY refers to the Integration Key that is shown on the service's Integrations tab in the PagerDuty web app.

Here's an example command that would trigger an incident in PagerDuty if your service's integration key was 65d9cd0e14c04dae8ef86867277d138c:

$ export PD_SERVICE_KEY=65d9cd0e14c04dae8ef86867277d138c
$ pd-send -k $PD_SERVICE_KEY -t trigger -d "Server is on fire" -i server.fire
Event processed. Incident Key: server.fire

Here is an example command that triggers an incident in PagerDuty with multiple fields (key/value pairs). Note that -f is used before each pair:

$ export PD_SERVICE_KEY=65d9cd0e14c04dae8ef86867277d138c
$ pd-send -k $PD_SERVICE_KEY -t trigger -d "Server is on fire" -i server.fire -f MSG1=TEST1 -f MSG2=TEST2

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Integration Key

If copying this example, remember to substitute your service’s integration key for PD_SERVICE_KEY.

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User Permissions

The user that runs pd-send and other pd-* integration scripts should preferably have a umask that allows world-readability of files that the user creates (i.e., 022). If the umask is more restrictive, the pd-* script changes the umask internally (only for itself) so enqueue-event files are created with the correct permissions.

Manage the Queue

Use the command pd-queue to check the queue of outbound alerts. This command gives an overview of the queue's status, and also allows you to retry events. This command needs to be run as root (i.e., sudo pd-queue status), since it requires access to directories that the pdagent user owns.

The following commands are available to help manage the queue:

pd-queue -h

$ pd-queue -h
usage: pd-queue [-h] {status,retry} ...

Access local queue of PagerDuty Agent.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help      show this help message and exit

sub-commands:
  {status,retry}
    retry         set up 'dead' PagerDuty events for retry.
    status        print out status of local event queue.

pd-queue status

Displays the pending, successful and in-error events in the Agent queue currently, as a table keyed by service key.

$ pd-queue status -h
usage: pd-queue status [-h] [-k SERVICE_KEY]

Print out status of local event queue.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -k SERVICE_KEY, --service-key SERVICE_KEY
                        print status of events in given Service API Key

$ pd-queue status
Service Key                           Pending   Success  In Error
=================================================================
key1                                        1         0         0
key2                                        1         0         1

$ pd-queue status -k key2
Service Key                           Pending   Success  In Error
=================================================================
key2                                        1         0         1

pd-queue retry

This command moves all events for a specified integration key that are in an error state into a pending state. After addressing any configuration issues (e.g., shortening an event that was too long), retried events should not result in an error. If a retried event results in an error again, however, the agent will move it back to an error state.

$ pd-queue retry -h
usage: pd-queue retry [-h] [-k SERVICE_KEY] [-a]

Set up 'dead' pagerduty events for retry.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -k SERVICE_KEY, --service-key SERVICE_KEY
                        retry events in given Service API Key (not to be used
                        with -a)
  -a, --all-keys        retry events in all Service API Keys (not to be used
                        with -k)

$ pd-queue retry -k key2
1 events set up for retry.

$ pd-queue retry -a
0 event(s) set up for retry.

Integrate with Monitoring Tools

PagerDuty Agent includes scripts to help you integrate with common monitoring tools. Please see the appropriate guide for more details:

Using a Proxy

If your environment requires a proxy for outbound HTTP/HTTPS connections, you can specify proxy configuration by editing /lib/systemd/system/pdagent.service on systemd-based systems or /etc/init.d/pdagent on SysV init-based systems as the root user.

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Restart the Agent

After adjusting the proxy configuration file, please restart the PagerDuty Agent with the command systemctl restart pdagent.

systemd-based Systems

sudo nano /lib/systemd/system/pdagent.service

Add two lines after ExecStartPre=/bin/chown -R pdagent:pdagent /var/run/pdagent (typically near line 8) to replace the URL with your proxy information, as shown in the example below:

ExecStartPre=/bin/chown -R pdagent:pdagent /var/run/pdagent

Environment="http_proxy=http://proxy:3128/"
Environment="https_proxy=http://proxy:3128/"

SysV init-based Systems

sudo nano /etc/init.d/pdagent

Add two lines after PID_FILE=$PID_DIR/pdagentd.pid (typically near line 48) to replace the URL with your proxy information, as shown in the example below:

PID_FILE=$PID_DIR/pdagentd.pid

export http_proxy=http://proxy:3128/
export https_proxy=http://proxy:3128/

Updated 9 days ago

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