Cortex’s on-call assistant works with the PagerDuty integration to automatically surface the most vital information about your service health and metadata when an incident is detected in PagerDuty. The on-call assistant delivers information to on-call users that are paged to respond to an incident; this packet of information includes information about the affected entity, recent deploys, ownership information, and quick links to lookup more details like dependencies and their owners.

The on-call assistant not only helps users respond to incidents in real time, but can also help reduce MTTR in the process. This tool can also drive adoption an engagement through links to the catalogs and Scorecards.

Notifications

When a new incident is created in PagerDuty, the on-call assistant will notify relevant users via Slack. This alert will include information about the affected entity, deploy details, and ownership information so an on-call team member can reach out to other relevant parties about the incident.

Cortex APIs have data for recent deploys, the last ten events, runbooks, dashboards, etc. All of this information lives within Cortex already, and can be accessed directly from the Slack notification so engineers can quickly access the data they need to resolve an issue.

Note that the on-call assistant also provides a direct link to View alert in PagerDuty, so you can also quickly access the original incident. 

View runbooks and other links

View dependencies

Enabling the on-call assistant

To enable the on-call assistant, navigate to Settings and then scroll down to Pagerduty listed under Integrations. Below the integration access token, you’ll see a toggle for Webhook – to set up the on-call assistant, an admin must toggle this setting on. 

PagerDuty must be configured in Cortex with a “full access” token in order for the correct webhooks to be set up.