RigD - Building Effective SlackOps

Dude, I’m Not On Call!

Getting PagerDuty On Call info in Slack will save time and your sanity!

Back in 2006 I was working on a support staff of two for a small startup. It wasn’t hard for anyone to guess who was on call with only two of us. Fast forward 4 years, I was working on a much bigger engineering team, and happily not on call whilst enjoying an evening out. Sure enough I get a call from a coworker in support.

“Hey man I am working this DB corruption case and I ran the script to fix the transactions but it doesn’t seem to be working. I wasn’t sure who was on escalations so I figured I’d call you since your the DB expert.”

“Dude, I’m not on call I’m at the bar.”

Of, course I also don’t know who is on call because there are a bunch of us and we are only on escalatons once every other month. So my only responsible option is to go find a nice bench outside, talk him through the incident resolution, and forego meeting my future wife.

Being on call is not fun and when you are not on call you really, really, don’t want to be bothered.

Nearly 10 years later technology has vastly improved the ability for people to figure out who’s on call and escalate incidents letting the service figure out who to engage. Despite that people are still desperately seeking the information in times of crisis and calling “old reliable” when they can’t figure it out fast enough. Ruining a night out at the bar might adversly impact me, but it’s not going to do much more. However, when old reliable doesn’t answer minutes are lost in resolving the outage. In another circumstance that no on call person who answered might be pulled away from a valuable project that is consequently delayed.

At RigD we aimed to solve this relatively simple challenge in the fastest and simplest way possible. It takes two things PagerDuty, where the on call schedule is defined, and Slack where everyone lives, digitally speaking that is. We deploy our RigD app to Slack then connect to our PagerDuty through RigD. Now we can figure out who’s on call for any team of service from within Slack in just a few seconds. Sure we could have just used the PagerDuty Web or mobile app. But that context switching from Slack to PagerDuty and the pointing and clicking is tedius and slower to the tune of 10x over typing a few words in Slack. What’s more is anyone in Slack can now figure out who’s on call, not just someone who has PagerDuty and is proficient enough to find the on call info. When your running a tiered support model with PagerDuty really only existing for the DevOps team this is big value. And since collaboration is critical to operational success, you have to consider the sharability of that data. Sure you can take a screenshot and email it or drop it in Slack, but that more time wasted. Pulling the data directly in Slack provides instant sharability.

So awesome now we can type a few magic words and get the on call info in our channel. But typing is ill advised when you have cheetos fingers, so we figured it woud best to avoid it. So we made it possible to get the on call details on a schedule and then publish it to a Slack Channel Topic. Want to know who’s on call, you need only to look to the top of your screen.On call details in the blink of an eye, no typing needed no commands to remember. Best of all you can go from 0 to fully set up automation and all in under 5 minutes. I put a guide together to walk you through it pagerduty-whos-on-call

I know it doesn’t sound so dramatic and world changing, but think about this. Setting this simple capability could help you shave a few minutes of your outage time to resolution thereby saving your company thousands and turning you into a workplace hero!

Come check out what we are up to at RigD, we are all about what we call SlackOps. Driving better operations through collaboration and automation.