PagerDuty and Teleport: System Access Only When You Need It
Tags: devops, oncall, security
Published: 2021-09-02 19:36:53

You may know that PagerDuty has over 600 integrations that add a wide variety of functionality to the core platform and workflows. Some integrations provide upstream data sources, like metrics and monitoring. Some are for downstream capabilities like reporting. Some interesting integrations help you in the moment when you are responding to an incident.

[Teleport](https://goteleport.com) provides secure access to applications, cloud infrastructure, databases, and Kubernetes environments without getting in your way. We wanted to showcase Teleport on our Twitch channels [PDCommunity](https://twitch.tv/pdcommunity) and [PagerDuty](https://twitch.tv/pagerduty) to give PagerDuty users an idea of how powerful integrations can be. If you missed us on Twitch, we posted the video to our [YouTube channel](https://youtu.be/7XxHWLGJKzw)

We’ll be hosting more integration partners in the future, so make sure you follow our channels! 

## Responding to Incidents When You Don’t Have Permanent Access
Access to many production environments is constrained for average users. The ability to log in to systems, whether for diagnostics or remediation, might be strictly limited to prevent accidents from happening or to meet critical compliance requirements.

These restrictions are great when systems and services are up and running well. But when something happens that needs some investigation - when you have an incident in PagerDuty - limitations can get in your way and slow you down. 

That’s when you need some tooling to help you get where you need to go. Fast.

![Image of keys by MasterTux from Pixabay ](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/dhe6adr8nc94fhzznbzj.jpg)

## PagerDuty and Teleport Go Well Together
Teleport gives your teams a mechanism for keeping your compliance officers happy, limiting access to infrastructure that is running well, and escalating access when things go wrong. Your teams don’t need to have direct access to systems and services running in production all the time, but they might need access when responding to an alert. 

The Teleport integration with PagerDuty allows your team members to request access to permitted systems and have that request automatically granted when that team member is on call and has a live incident. Teleport queries the [PagerDuty API](https://developer.pagerduty.com/api-reference/) to verify that the requestor is, in fact, on-call and has an unresolved incident. No waiting for the helpdesk. No asking around or escalating to someone else who has access already. Just click the button in Teleport. Teleport talks to PagerDuty and access is granted. Hook up Teleport and your SSO provider to give all of your teams the access they need exactly when they need it.

Best of all, that access is temporary. Credentials are automatically limited in scope and duration, so there are no logins sitting around after the incident is resolved.

## Other Features Teleport Provides
As if privileges-on-request wasn’t enough, Teleport has another really killer feature your team, and your compliance auditor, will love.

Think about how you’d want to document activities. Teleport provides a log that can be exported, detailing all of the actions taken, who they were taken by, and where they were performed.  But it goes a step further and provides a **video recording** of the screens as well. Imagine putting that tool to use for your [postmortems or retrospectives](https://postmortems.pagerduty.com/?utm_source=devto&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=twitch_teleport&utm_contentblog&utm_id=community). Don’t remember exactly what commands were run? No problem. Let’s go to tape!

Seriously, [you need to see it](https://youtu.be/7XxHWLGJKzw?t=1397). It's so cool. 

There's also an awesome session joining feature that can allow more responders to join the same ssh session and see what's going on. Need to escalate to a senior engineer during an incident? They can join your session directly. See it in action [here](https://youtu.be/7XxHWLGJKzw?t=1679).

## See For Yourself
You can check out our [stream recording on Twitch](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1128147447) until September 7th, and then it will be part of our video library on [YouTube](https://youtu.be/7XxHWLGJKzw). 

Set your team up for success when responding to incidents. Get your [PagerDuty account](https://www.pagerduty.com/sign-up/) set up today, and take a look at our [integrations page](https://www.pagerduty.com/integrations/).

Then get started with [Teleport](https://goteleport.com/pricing/). Give your engineers access to SSH servers, Kubernetes clusters, web applications, and database servers while keeping your security and compliance team happy. 

Follow us on [Twitch](https://twitch.tv/pagerduty) and subscribe to our [YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/pagerduty). Want to know more about PagerDuty and our Community activities? [Join our community](https://community.pagerduty.com/join/twitch)

You can visit both PagerDuty and Teleport at upcoming events like (KubeCon North America)[https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-north-america/], (SRECon)[https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon21], and (AWS re:Invent)[https://reinvent.awsevents.com/], so stop by our live or virtual booths and say hello!