How to send email and slack incident notifications via 'Response Play'

Hi all,

we are currently trying to automate our incident communication management which consists out of:

  • sending notification, update and resolve emails to a distribution list
  • notifying our slack war-room channel that there is an incident (pagerduty alers go to dedicated alert channels)

We looked into the ‘response play’ function that allows you to create automated workflows that can be triggered directly from slack, which is great. However, so far it looks to me that the whole notification automation evolves around direct pager duty users. But this would not work for us, because we have external partners as well as internal teams that are not part of the pagerduty userbase and they need to be notified via generic channels such as slack or email.
Did I miss a configuration option ? We also looked into a tool called ‘fire hydrant’ and it delivers exactly what we need but since we are already using pager duty for our oncall schedule and alerting it would make much more sense to have those automation flows managed by pager duty. How can we achieve this with pagerduty?

Best regards
Marty

Hello Marty,

Incident notifications would usually be sent to PagerDuty users. If the affected service is associated with a Slack Channel, members in the channel will be notified when an Incident is triggered. The same will apply to the use of Distribution emails as users.

Outside of those options, only PagerDuty users will be notified if Response Plays are employed.

I hope that helps.

Regards,