PagerDuty

Freesbe takes incidents from PagerDuty. Once an admin connects it:

• Each incident posts into the channel you pick as one card, with its severity, title, the service it’s on, who it’s assigned to, its number, priority, urgency and team.
• The card keeps up with PagerDuty. Acknowledgements, reassignments, escalations, priority changes and notes change the same card, and when the incident is resolved it turns green and says how long it lasted. A reply under it lets everyone following the thread know.
• Acknowledge and Resolve on the card act in PagerDuty, as the person who pressed them, when you give Freesbe an API key.
• A live problems board pinned in the channel lists every open incident, worst first, and reports post on their own every morning or every Monday.

Incidents post as their own member, PagerDuty, so their cards are easy to tell apart from people.

Connect PagerDuty

Only owners and admins can connect it. You need someone who can add webhooks in PagerDuty (a Manager, Admin or Account Owner there).

1. Open Workspace settings → Integrations & apps → Integrations → Monitoring and click Connect under PagerDuty.
2. Give the connection a name, like PagerDuty: storefront, and pick the channel it posts to.
3. Pick which incidents to post under Incidents to post (see Severities).
4. For the Acknowledge and Resolve buttons, fill in PagerDuty address and API token (see Acknowledge and resolve from the card). You can add them later.
5. Click Connect PagerDuty. Freesbe shows the Freesbe URL that PagerDuty sends incidents to. Copy it now: it’s only shown once.

Then, in PagerDuty:

1. Open Integrations → Generic Webhooks (v3) and click New Webhook.
2. Paste the Freesbe URL in Webhook URL. Under Scope Type, pick the Service or Team whose incidents should post.
3. Under Event Subscription, keep the incident events ticked: triggered, acknowledged, unacknowledged, reassigned, escalated, priority updated, annotated and resolved.
4. Click Add Webhook, then Send Test Event. Nothing posts for the test, but the connection’s Last event in Freesbe changes to just now.

Severities

PagerDuty incidents have a priority, when your account uses them, and always an urgency. Freesbe goes by the priority first:

In PagerDuty	On the card	Icon
P1 (or SEV1)	Critical	🚨
P2, or no priority and high urgency	High	🔴
P3	Minor	🟠
P4, or no priority and low urgency	Warning	🟡
P5	Info	🔵

Incidents to post leaves out incidents below the severity you pick. When someone raises an incident’s priority later, its card changes severity too.

The cards

Each card shows:

• The severity, and whether the incident is triggered, acknowledged (and by whom) or resolved.
• Its title, linked to the incident in PagerDuty, and the service it’s on.
• Who it’s assigned to, and its number, priority, urgency and team.
• The latest change, like Escalated to Tom Becker or Tom Becker added a note: Rolled back the 14:02 deploy.
• Acknowledge, Resolve and Open in PagerDuty.

Acknowledge and resolve from the card

With an API key, everyone in the channel can press Acknowledge on a triggered incident and Resolve on an open one. PagerDuty records it as the person who pressed it: Freesbe sends their Freesbe email, so it must be their email in PagerDuty too. If it isn’t, Freesbe tells them, and nothing changes.

To set it up:

1. In PagerDuty, open Integrations → API Access Keys and click Create New API Key. Give it a description, like Freesbe, and leave Read-only API Key unticked.
2. In the connection’s settings in Freesbe, fill in PagerDuty address, where you sign in to PagerDuty (like https://northwind.pagerduty.com, or https://northwind.eu.pagerduty.com for the EU service region), and paste the key in API token.

Freesbe checks the key before saving it, and keeps it encrypted.

The board and reports

Like Zabbix, each connection pins a live problems board in its channel, listing the open incidents, worst first, with how long and who acknowledged them. Turn it off with Pin a live problems board in the connection’s settings.

Reports count the incidents Freesbe got over the last day or week: by severity, still open, total time open, the typical time to resolve, the noisiest incidents and the busiest services. Pick Every morning at 9:00 or Monday mornings at 9:00 under Reports. See The live problems board and Reports for more.

Questions

Does Freesbe page people? No. PagerDuty still pages whoever is on call; Freesbe shows the whole team what’s going on, in the channel where they already talk.

Who can see the cards? Everyone in the channel. Use a private channel for incidents only some people should see.

Is the URL a secret? Yes: anyone with it can post incidents into the channel. If it leaks, delete the connection and connect again for a new URL.

Can different services go to different channels? Yes. Connect PagerDuty once per channel, and add a webhook for each in PagerDuty, scoped to its service or team.