New User - What is the best way to trigger scripts as part of an escalation policy / workflow?

Hello @kenneth huddleston! Thanks for reaching out.

You can definitely do this…though not through an escalation policy. For step 1 you use an escalation policy as you suggest but for step 2 you need to either leverage Event Orchestration (when events get to PagerDuty) or Incident Workflows (when an incident is created) and call an Automation Action. Looking at your flow, I would say using Incident Workflows makes more sense.

With an automation action you can run your scripts and bring their output into PagerDuty incident for the incident resolver (and any other stakeholder involved) to look at.

Regarding the second notification (I assume you are referring to a PagerDuty notification to your phone), this is something that you cannot do automatically and you shouldn’t need to. If you failed to acknowledge the incident on the first time you were contacted then this notification will be retried according to the escalation policy. Once the incident is acknowledged it is assumed that the incident responder is actively working on the issue.

What you can still do through incident workflow is to send a status update to all the stakeholders. You can create your own Status Update template and import the result from previous steps (in your case the automation action).

Note: At the time of writing you can only use the output of previous steps on the Text Message field (SMS and Push Notification) and it is limited to 110 characters.

Since you are just starting with PagerDuty let me recommend you PagerDuty University for on-demand learning and more specifically the training on incident Workflows and Process Automation.

Let me know if this helps!

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