Create an GitHub workflow that’s triggered by a Pagerduty alert

Sometimes, it’s useful to be able to run a GitHub workflow for and alert that has been triggered in Pagerduty. To do so, we can use Pagerduty’s incident workflow feature.

Steps

On the PagerDuty side

1. Go to the list of incident workflows and click the New Workflow button in the right side of the screen.

2. Give it a suggestive name and click the Create button

3. In the Builder section, click Add Trigger and choose the desired one

4. When you’re happy with the trigger, click the Add Action button

5. From the list of actions, search after Send a Webhook POST, select it once you find it and click the Add Action button on the right

6. After adding the Send a Webhook POST action, a menu should have been opened for you on the right side of the screen

7. In that menu, enter the following:

   • URL: https://api.github.com/repos/2i2c-org/infrastructure/dispatches

   • Authentication Headers: 2i2c-Bot GitHub PAT

   • Headers:

     Content-Type: application/json
     Accept: application/vnd.github.v3+json
     

   • Body

     {
       "event_type": "some-relevant-keyword-for-matching-this-event",
       "client_payload": {
         "incident_id": "{{incident.id}}",
         "title": "{{incident.title}}",
         "service": "{{incident.service.name}}",
         "type": "{{incident.incident_type.display_name}}"
       }
     }
     

   Note

   Note that the event type is what’s going to be used by GitHub to trigger or not the workflow. Also, other things can be included in the payload. Experiment!

On the GitHub side

1. Create a new workflow file in .github/workflows

2. In this file, the following info is important:

    name: P1 outages actions
    on:
      repository_dispatch:
        types: [some-relevant-keyword-for-matching-this-event]
   

3. Add the jobs you want

Now, this workflow will run every time the conditions set in the incident workflow you set up, if they match the following some-relevant-keyword-for-matching-this-event type.