As much as most of us would love to not have to do it, most people reading this now will have to be on call at some point. It sucks, but Pagerduty makes it a little easier to manage when your team starts to grow.
Whilst we still have Nagios sending to all contacts directly (a personal preference) we still rely on Pagerduty for emergency pages from the rest of the company, and to arrange who is on call when (their calendar is pretty good for us, allows for exceptions etc).
We’re also a user of the IRC bot “irccat” which, briefly explained, allows input/output to scripts from an IRC chat.
I wanted to combine the two for a long time, and when Pagerduty released their API to access schedule data it wasn’t long before we had a command that allows anyone in the company to ask irccat who is on call and until when.
I’ve finally got around to releasing this today, a “library” of useful Pagerduty API functions (pagerduty.php) (note currently it has just two, to see who is on call for a given schedule. Pull requests for additional useful functions please!) and more importantly, pagerdutycron.php – A script to run on an interval that will then either broadcast in IRC a new person on call, and/or send an email.
As usual, I’ve stuck the code on Github: https://github.com/lozzd/PagerdutyPHP