Introducing PagerDuty Notification Channel in BizTalk360

Introduction

BizTalk360, being a monitoring partner for your BizTalk environment, has a wide range of capabilities to periodically monitor your BizTalk infrastructure and send timely alerts whenever there is a violation, and update you with regular health check reports as well as the ability to send scheduled reports with high-level views on various performance metrics. Notifying business users of such critical information will help them in taking immediate action to resolve the issues. BizTalk360 notification system sends alert notifications to various channels such as Email and SMS, other external notification channels such as Slack, ServiceNow, WebHook, Microsoft Teams, SMTP and Twilio and also, we can obtain alert details using Event Log.

In addition to the existing list of external notification channels, we are happy to announce that now we have the provision to add the PagerDuty channel as well.

Benefits of PagerDuty

PagerDuty offers insights so you can appropriately respond to major violations by enhancing and aggregating events and connecting them into actionable incidents. Your monitoring tools should send PagerDuty a trigger event to report a new problem or update an ongoing problem, depending on the event type.

Depending on your pricing plan’s features, PagerDuty sends notifications via the following channels:

• Email Notifications
• SMS Notifications
• Phone Notifications
• Push Notifications

To enable further correlation, monitoring alarms status, analytics reports and automated tasks alert from BizTalk360 can be set up to be sent on the PagerDuty notification channel.

Some alerts shouldn’t be treated equally. When something happens unusually, you may need to know about it immediately. Certain alerts going into email land just aren’t good enough. PagerDuty has a great escalation policy, you can set on-call schedules, multiple services, and all sorts of fun alerting goodness to help you not miss the unusual issues. Adding an extra layer of protection by sending SMS and phone alerts for those systems that are the most critical.

Let’s take an example, if a Threshold violation occurs on business days between 01:10 PM and 02:10 PM and lasts for 01 minutes or more, you can see the artifacts with their status and any issues if you configured a PagerDuty channel. BizTalk360 will begin monitoring the status of the artefact based on the threshold condition, Data Monitoring conditions. If a threshold is violated, BizTalk360 will raise an incident via the selected PagerDuty notification channel. When it is determined that you or another assigned responder will be unable to respond to an incident, you have the option of reassigning the incident to the next user.

In this blog, we will see how to add integration in PagerDuty and how to connect the integration with BizTalk360 to receive incidents.

Configuring PagerDuty

1. Establish a PagerDuty service

• Log in with a valid email address and password of your PagerDuty account.
• Go to the Services -> Service Directory. Click Add New Service if you want to create a new service.
• Name: Enter a Name that represents the application that you wish to open incidents against (example: “BizTalk360”). Please note that this is the service name that will be connected to the event when it is triggered.
• Description: Describe this service’s role in your infrastructure.

• Assign: Select Generate a new Escalation Policy or Select an existing Escalation Policy. Click Next to continue. You will be designated as the first level on-call for the service if you create a new escalation policy. After the service is formed, you can alter the escalation policy whenever you choose.
• Reduce Noise: Choose from the following possibilities:

1. Intelligent
2. Content-Based
3. Time-Based
4. Turn Off Alert Grouping

To proceed, click Next.

2. Add Integrations

• Select the integration as Events API V2 to send alerts to this service from the search bar, dropdown or the list of integrations.

• Click the Create Service button at the bottom of the page.
• On Successful creation of the page, it will redirect to the integration tab under the Services directory where the Integration Key can be obtained.

PagerDuty Notification Channel in BizTalk360

In BizTalk360 v10.3 you can see a default PagerDuty notification channel and configure that by providing the below-mentioned details:

1. Integration Key – Provide the Integration key of the PagerDuty instance
2. Client (Optional) – The name of the monitoring client that is triggering this event. (Ex: BizTalk360)
3. Client URL (Optional) – The URL of the monitoring client that is triggering this event. (http://localhost/BizTalk360/). Client URL will help you to easily redirect to the intended feature or website.
4. Notification Settings – Enable “Notify only Error(s) and Warning(s)” to notify only the error and warning state artifacts in the alert. Else the artifacts which are in a healthy state will also be listed in the alert
5. Proxy Settings (Optional) – Provide your Proxy server details if the BizTalk360 environment is behind a proxy
6. Click the Save button to save the PagerDuty configuration settings

Configuring PagerDuty as a Custom notification Channel

The users have the option to create their custom PagerDuty notification channel, to meet the business requirement. Follow the steps below to create a custom PagerDuty channel:

1. Click on “Add new channel” from the top right corner
2. Select the “Notifier.PagerDutyNotification.dll” file from the notifier folder available in your BizTalk360 installation path.
3. Change the channel name or logo of your wish and follow the above-mentioned 6 steps.

Enabling the PagerDuty Notification Channel in a BizTalk360 Alarm

You can enable the PagerDuty notification channel from the Alarm configuration in BizTalk360. BizTalk360 will begin monitoring the status of the artefact based on the threshold condition, Data Monitoring conditions. If a threshold is violated, BizTalk360 will raise an incident via the selected PagerDuty notification channel.

You could enable your PagerDuty Notification channel as follows:

• Create a new alarm
• In the Custom Notification Channel(s) section, you will notice PagerDuty is listed with a toggle icon. Toggle the icon to enable the PagerDuty Notifications.
• For BizTalk360 to be able to trigger notifications into PagerDuty, you need to enter the following fields
  • Severity (Mandatory field) – The perceived severity of the status of the event is described concerning the affected system.
  • Client, Client-URL – Here you can overwrite the one which was given on the settings side.
  • Component – Component of the source machine that is responsible for the event.
  • Group – Logical grouping of components of a service
  • Class – The class/type of the event.
• Click Save to create the alarm.

• Map the alarm with any Application artifacts and the BizTalk Server environment.
• Once the mapping is done, whenever there is any threshold violation in the environment, you will receive alert notifications via the email which was given while configuring the PagerDuty account. By clicking view incident in the received mail, it will redirect to the incident page on the PagerDuty website where we can view the entire alert details.gif

Similarly, you can configure the PagerDuty notification channel in the report scheduling and automated tasks.

Note: To receive the analytics report as a link, you need to provide the BizTalk360 Hosted URL in the System Settings of the BizTalk360 application.

Alert details in the PagerDuty Portal

1. Title – This can be the name of an alarm, a schedule, or a task.
2. Source – The unique location of the affected system. Here we are displaying the BizTalk360 – Configured environment name.
3. Link – You can access the generated report by clicking the URL.
4. Client URL – By clicking this, you can redirect to the appropriate page.

The incidents are listed in the PagerDuty Incidents directory.

Alert for artifacts monitoring using alarm configuration:

Alert for BizTalk messaging Performance using schedule reports:

Alert for automated tasks:

Conclusion

As a result, PagerDuty aids in the receipt of alert notifications for the various monitoring group types in the configured environment and also the BizTalk360 supports custom notification channels, which you can configure according to your business requirements. If you’re new to BizTalk360 and wish to evaluate our product or take a product tour. Take a quick go by signing up for a free trial.

Happy Integration!