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Using a regex or wildcard when using API to search incidents, alerts or services?

  • May 16, 2025
  • 4 replies
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We have a lot of services for our organisation. If I call the URL https://api.pagerduty.com/services?limit=100&time_zone=UTC then there are too many and the list is truncated.

 

I have tried this

https://api.pagerduty.com/services?limit=100&time_zone=UTC&name=*E*

and this

https://api.pagerduty.com/services?limit=100&time_zone=UTC&name=.*E.*

but they doesn’t work.

This seems like an obvious feature to have, but I do not see it in the reference guide, e.g https://developer.pagerduty.com/api-reference/e960cca205c0f-list-services


is my only choice to iterate through all the pages and pass the output jq, then grep?

 

 

Best answer by mwalls

Hi ​@pmansfield 

You can use the query parameter with the /services endpoint, although it’s not documented (I’m not sure why it’s not documented; but it was available in the pagerduty cli, so I went digging).

 

query doesn’t support a full regex, it’s really a contains match. It is at least case-insensitive, which is helpful. It also only applies to the name of the object, in this case the service name. For users it will match first or last name. I think it’s available for all objects, but I haven’t dug that deeply into it; I’m going off what Martin had in the cli code, which had query as a base argument for all objects.

 

So if I’m digging in one of my sandboxes and send a GET /services?query=shop, I get back one example list:

Fabulous Shop Database

Fabulous Shop Frontend

Fabulous Shop Search Caching

Fabulous Shop Search Service Backend

Fabulous Shop Shopping Cart Backend

Shopping Cart - Microservices Demo

Shopping Cart - Pulumi Demo-f7d625c

If using query doesn’t cull your records enough, you might want to take a look at the pagination docs. Pagination is definitely awkward if you are using shell scripts or command line tools, but usable from Python or Go.

​@lupimiguel query works on the /vendors endpoint as well. Python example here. 

 

HTH. Sorry for the confusion. We’ll see if we can get that param documented better.

--mandi

4 replies

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  • pmansfield
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  • New Member
  • May 16, 2025

I used services as an example, but the same could apply to the incidents API.

lupimiguel
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  • lupimiguel
  • Community Manager
  • May 16, 2025

Hi ​@pmansfield, 

I’m afraid you’re correct. Currently the PagerDuty REST API does not support regex or wildcard matching in query parameters for endpoints like /services or /incidents. The name parameter only supports exact matches, and partial string or pattern-based searches aren’t available via the API at this time. You can see this in the PagerDuty API docs, and search docs.

The usual workaround is to paginate through all results and then filter them locally using jq an grep. I understand this is not ideal, but it’s the only way to achieve pattern-based filtering right now.

Funny that I tried doing the exact same thing earlier this week when searching the /vendors API to help a user, and ended up iterating through each page using jq, which took longer than it needed. 😅

I believe Regex support is available in other parts of PagerDuty, like event orchestration and email integrations, but not for API object searches.

I’ll reach out to the API team and run this by them to see if there are any blockers or challenges, but if you’d like to see this feature added, I recommend submitting feedback to PagerDuty support or through your account team in the meanwhile to generate some traction. Please feel free to include a link to this topic.

Let me know if I can help with anything else, and have a nice weekend!

mwalls
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  • mwalls
  • Community Manager
  • Answer
  • May 16, 2025

Hi ​@pmansfield 

You can use the query parameter with the /services endpoint, although it’s not documented (I’m not sure why it’s not documented; but it was available in the pagerduty cli, so I went digging).

 

query doesn’t support a full regex, it’s really a contains match. It is at least case-insensitive, which is helpful. It also only applies to the name of the object, in this case the service name. For users it will match first or last name. I think it’s available for all objects, but I haven’t dug that deeply into it; I’m going off what Martin had in the cli code, which had query as a base argument for all objects.

 

So if I’m digging in one of my sandboxes and send a GET /services?query=shop, I get back one example list:

Fabulous Shop Database

Fabulous Shop Frontend

Fabulous Shop Search Caching

Fabulous Shop Search Service Backend

Fabulous Shop Shopping Cart Backend

Shopping Cart - Microservices Demo

Shopping Cart - Pulumi Demo-f7d625c

If using query doesn’t cull your records enough, you might want to take a look at the pagination docs. Pagination is definitely awkward if you are using shell scripts or command line tools, but usable from Python or Go.

​@lupimiguel query works on the /vendors endpoint as well. Python example here. 

 

HTH. Sorry for the confusion. We’ll see if we can get that param documented better.

--mandi

lupimiguel
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  • pmansfield
  • Author
  • New Member
  • May 19, 2025

thanks very much ​@mwalls for that, it was very useful.

I generate reports from pagerduty using the API and python, so having to page through the query results, stitch them together and and then grep out the things for each service or engineering team would be non-trivial and risk errors.

lupimiguel
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