Configuring Backstage

Note

To setup the PagerDuty plugin on Backstage you need to have an API Key - or client id and client secret for OAuth to generate an access token - and an Integration Key generated both for your account and service. If you don't have this information already you must follow the steps described in the PagerDuty integration section.

Installing the plugin

Note

The following steps assume you already have a Backstage project created. If that is not the case, follow the Getting Started guide on Backstage.io to create one or create one by running npx @backstage/create-app on your terminal.

To install the PagerDuty plugin into Backstage run the following commands from your Backstage root directory.

yarn add --cwd packages/app @pagerduty/backstage-plugin @pagerduty/backstage-plugin-common # (1)!

This command adds @pagerduty/backstage-plugin and @pagerduty/backstage-plugin-common packages to the packages/app folder because it is a frontend plugin.

yarn add --cwd packages/backend @pagerduty/backstage-plugin-backend @pagerduty/backstage-plugin-common # (1)!

This command adds @pagerduty/backstage-plugin-backend and @pagerduty/backstage-plugin-common packages to the packages/backend folder because it is a backend plugin.

That's it! Now it's time to add the plugin to Backstage and your services.

Add the frontend plugin to your application

The frontend plugin needs to be added to your application and currently that requires some code changes to the Backstage application. We will do that by updating the EntityPage.tsx file in packages/app/src/components/catalog.

Add the following imports to the top of the file:

import {
    isPluginApplicableToEntity as isPagerDutyAvailable,
    EntityPagerDutyCard,
} from '@pagerduty/backstage-plugin';

Find const overviewContent in EntityPage.tsx, and add the following snippet inside the outermost Grid defined there, just before the closing </Grid> tag:

<EntitySwitch>
  <EntitySwitch.Case if={isPagerDutyAvailable}>
    <Grid item md={6}>
      <EntityPagerDutyCard />
    </Grid>
  </EntitySwitch.Case>
</EntitySwitch>

Once you are done, the overviewContent definition should look similar to this:

const overviewContent = (
  <Grid ...>
    ...
    <EntitySwitch>
      <EntitySwitch.Case if={isPagerDutyAvailable}>
        <Grid item md={6}>
          <EntityPagerDutyCard />
        </Grid>
      </EntitySwitch.Case>
    </EntitySwitch>
  </Grid>
);

Now the PagerDuty plugin will be displayed in all your components that include PagerDuty annotations.

Note

The code samples provided above reflect the default configuration of the PagerDutyCard entity. You have at your disposal some parameters that allow you to prevent users from creating incidents, or hide the change events tab or even hide the on-call section of the card.

Configure the Frontend plugin

The frontend plugin for PagerDuty is now added to your application but in order for it to show you need to configure your entities and the application itself.

Annotating entities

For every component that shows up in your Backstage catalog you have a .yaml file with its configuration. Add an annotation to the entity like this:

annotations:
  pagerduty.com/integration-key: [INTEGRATION-KEY] #(1)!

The integration key is generated per service and is obtained on the service integrations page on the PagerDuty console. If you don't have one, follow the steps at Create a service integration for Backstage.

Note

You can optionally decide to annotate with a service id instead but you won't be able to create incidents from Backstage if you do so and the Create Incident button will not show on the PagerDuty card.

annotations:
    pagerduty.com/service-id: [SERVICE-ID] #(1)!

The service id can be found by navigating to a Service with PagerDuty console and pulling the ID value out of the URL (e.g. https://[YOUR-ACCOUNT].pagerduty.com/service-directory/[SERVICE-ID]).

Add the backend plugin to your application

Note

Version 0.6.0 of the backend plugin (@pagerduty/backstage-plugin-backend) introduced support for Backstage's new backend system which simplifies the backend configuration and requires less code.

If you followed the steps in "Installing the plugin", the backend plugin for PagerDuty is now added to your application but in order for it to expose its capabilities to the frontend plugin you need to configure it. There are two approaches for that: Legacy Backend System or the New Backend System.

Warning

If you were using the PagerDuty plugin for Backstage before the release of @pagerduty/backstage-plugin-backend@0.6.0 then you already have the Backend configured and you are probably looking for some migration steps, correct?

Check the migration guidance here.

Legacy Backend System

Create a new file called pagerduty.ts at packages/backend/src/plugins/pagerduty.ts and add the following content:

import { Router } from 'express';
import { PluginEnvironment } from '../types';
import { createRouter } from '@pagerduty/backstage-plugin-backend';

export default async function createPlugin(
    env: PluginEnvironment,
): Promise<Router> {
    return await createRouter({
        config: env.config,
        logger: env.logger,
    });
}

This creates the backend plugin that you can now configure in your application.

In packages/backend/src/index.ts import your plugin and add a route for the APIs exposed by PagerDuty's backend plugin.

import pagerduty from './plugins/pagerduty';
// ...
async function main() {
  // ...
  const pagerdutyEnv = useHotMemoize(module, () => createEnv('pagerduty'));
  // ...
  apiRouter.use('/pagerduty', await pagerduty(pagerdutyEnv));

New Backend System

Backstage's new backend system requires less code to setup plugins. Just open packages/backend/src/index.ts file and add the PagerDuty backend plugin to your Backstage App as shown below.

// pageduty plugin
backend.add(import('@pagerduty/backstage-plugin-backend'));

Configure API Authorization

The PagerDuty plugin requires access to PagerDuty APIs and so we need to configure our Backstage app with the necessary credentials to reach the APIs. This step requires you to use an access token - for OAuth - or an API token.

Note

If you followed previous steps you should have this information already but if you haven't done so follow the steps in Register an App to get the client id and client secret for OAuth authorization or Generate a General Access REST API Token to generate a REST API Token.

Scoped OAuth (recommended)

In app-config.yaml file add the following configuration and set your OAuth configuration:

pagerDuty:
  oauth:
    clientId: ${PD_CLIENT_ID}
    clientSecret: ${PD_CLIENT_SECRET}
    subDomain: ${PD_ACCOUNT_SUBDOMAIN}
    region: ${PD_ACCOUNT_REGION}  // Optional. allowed values: 'us', 'eu'.
                                  // Defaults to 'us'.

In app-config.yaml file add the following configuration to set your REST API Token:

pagerDuty:
  apiToken: ${PAGERDUTY_TOKEN}

Warning

If you were using the plugin before version 0.8.1 of the frontend or version 0.3.1 of the backend you need to configure a proxy configuration instead. That configuration is now deprecated so use this configuration instead.

Test your configuration

Start your Backstage app, passing the PagerDuty API token or OAuth parameters as a environment variables.

For Scoped OAuth

PD_CLIENT_ID='<ID>' PD_CLIENT_SECRET='<SECRET>' PD_ACCOUNT_SUBDOMAIN='<SUBDOMAIN>' PD_ACCOUNT_REGION='<REGION>'  yarn dev

For REST API Token

PAGERDUTY_TOKEN='<TOKEN>' yarn dev

This will add an Authorization header to all the requests made to PagerDuty REST APIS.