Advantages of API versus Email Integration

We currently rely on Email Integrations into PagerDuty. However, we are unable to dynamically set Incident Severity, update Severity, and manage time-based severities at the incident level (versus the service level). It appears that we CAN accomplish all of this by moving to API Integrations.

We have multiple systems that feed PagerDuty via email. I’d like to better understand any additional feature advantages that API integration offers over Email integration before committing man-hours to making the changes.

Hi Greg!

I’m happy to help list out some of the advantages of using the API versus using an email integration.

You already mentioned being able to set the severity of an alert via API as opposed to email. This a pretty big benefit - if you are using dynamic notifications, you can differentiate between how your responders should be notified for different types of alerts, between high urgency rules or low urgency rules.

Some other benefits of using the API include:

  • Sending more robust data with your alerts. I’d recommend referencing our Events V2 documentation for examples of what this looks like.
  • In addition to more robust data, these details will be presented in an a way that’s easy to quickly reference within the Pagerduty UI, specifically if you are leveraging PagerDuty Common Event Format.
  • You’ll be able to auto-resolve and deduplicate events that are associated with the same incident without having to create rules as you would with email integrations. To do this, you’ll just need to specify the incident_key or dedup_key, depending on which version of the API you are using. More information on this here.

I hope this helps - let me know if you have any additional questions!

Best,