PagerDuty Blog

Super Charge Data Infrastructure Automation with SaltStack and PagerDuty

Welcome, SaltStack, to the PagerDuty platform! SaltStack is an open source configuration management and remote execution tool that allows you to manage tens of thousands of servers. With the latest PagerDuty integration, you can monitor failures, oversee changes to your infrastructure, keep tabs on system vitals, and manage code deployments. Already mighty on its own, SaltStack has super powers when integrated with PagerDuty.

Monitoring Failures

The most obvious use of the SaltStack and PagerDuty integration is triggering alerts when things break. If your deployment doesn’t go as planned, we’ll let the right person know.

Monitoring Changes

Salt states allow you to declare what state a server should be in, and if it’s not compliant, make the necessary changes to enforce the state. State changes will trigger incidents in PagerDuty which you can acknowledge and triage. With Salt’s “onchanges” requisite, you’re all set.

Monitoring System Vitals

Like Salt states, Salt monitoring states let you define what thresholds your systems should be running at. While monitoring states aren’t designed to make or enforce changes to your deployment, they’ll monitor your systems’ vitals and generate an alert when your system runs outside the bounds that have been configured.

Code Deployment

Salt can also help you manage code deployments across your infrastructure. For example, you may need to stop a web server, deploy your code, then restart the webserver. You’d then want to make sure the web application is still functional after the web server restarts and that the new deployment hasn’t placed stress on the web server. Using Salt and PagerDuty, you can automate this process and be alerted in real time if things don’t go as planned.

Learn More at AWS re:Invent

We’re rallying the troops and heading down to Vegas for AWS re:Invent this week. If you want more information on our newest integration – or for questions, swag or just a chat – visit booth 948. Our buds, SaltStack, will be at K19.

Ready to get started? Check out the guide for setting up SaltStack with PagerDuty.