Solve On-Call Errors Faster With Raygun + PagerDuty

By Freyja Spaven | Posted Apr 26, 2016 | 3 min. (637 words)

Raygun now integrates with PagerDuty – the alarm aggregation and dispatching service for system administrators and support teams.

 With Raygun and PagerDuty working together, you can catch an error BEFORE it gets out of hand, regardless of the time of day.

Listen up on-call devs!

Here’s how Raygun and PagerDuty can get you out of a sticky spot (even at 4am):

We all know the feeling when an error ticket comes in, especially if it’s followed by an email from angry users.

It’s on you to fix the issue quickly and efficiently – but where is the error exactly?

It can take hours of debugging, trying to find the root cause… but if you catch it early, you’ll minimise the damage (and make you and your team look awesome.)

This is where Raygun Crash Reporting comes in.

Find the error right down to the line of code in real-time, so you can find it and fix it in minutes, not hours or days!

You can even collect the contact information of the affected user (invaluable for rescuing customers from the ‘cancel subscription’ button.)

But what if the error occurs when you are OUTSIDE of office hours?

Say at 4AM?

Usually, you may not get these error reports until the morning.

This is where PagerDuty comes in handy:

It’s all great finding errors before they happen during office hours, but we all know that isn’t always the case…

Especially with users in different timezones.

Well, PagerDuty will triage the issue first, then alert an on-call engineer (via text, email and call.)

And the best thing is:  you can choose to be alerted only when you have to be.

So if Raygun Crash Reporting picks up an error that has only affected 1 users in 10 hours … meh … you can carry on sleeping.

But if your payment processor has crashed in a different timezone, it’s time to alert an on-duty engineer.

With Raygun and PagerDuty working together, it means you can cut incident resolution time by hours, even at 4am.

In fact, here at Raygun, we’ve rescued countless users with our own PagerDuty alerts.

If you’re ready to do the same, here’s  a step-by step guide:

What you will need:

Step #1 – In your Raygun dashboard, head to the Crash Reporting tab:

Step #2 – Choose the Integrations tab on the dashboard:

Step #3 – Choose the PagerDuty Icon in the bottom right:

Step #4 – Choose the Setup Icon:

Step #5 – Head to the Services tab:

For this step, you’ll need a PagerDuty account (sign up for a trial here.)

Go through the full set-up process.

Head to the Configuration dropdown (1) , choose the Services header (2) , then click Add Service (3):

Step #6 – Set up an API in PagerDuty:

  1. Add company name in the Name field.
  2. Select ‘Use our API directly.’
  3. Click the ‘Add Service‘ button.

Step # 7 – Copy the Integration Key from Raygun: Settings:

Step #8 – Head over to ‘Raygun Integrations’ on the dashboard and paste the key into the ‘Service Key/Integration’ box:

Step #9 – Manually Set Error Notifications and Save Changes:

Assign the importance of the errors for the alerts:

Great! Now you are ready to start sending data and fixing errors faster than ever.

Here you can see it in action:

Raygun has detected an alert in the Crash Reporting tab:

…and here you can see PagerDuty has pinged a team member to resolve the issue:

Next, you can add your team and set up your first alerts.

Make being on call suck less and blast downtime in half with Raygun and PagerDuty!