Teleport
Run the PagerDuty Access Request Plugin
- Edge version
- Version 17.x
- Version 16.x
- Version 15.x
- Older Versions
With Teleport's PagerDuty integration, engineers can access the infrastructure they need to resolve incidents quickly—without longstanding admin permissions that can become a vector for attacks.
Teleport's PagerDuty integration allows you to treat Teleport Role Access Requests as PagerDuty incidents, notify the appropriate on-call team, and approve or deny the requests via Teleport. You can also configure the plugin to approve Role Access Requests automatically if the user making the request is on the on-call team for a service affected by an incident.
In Teleport Enterprise Cloud, Teleport manages the PagerDuty integration for you, and you can enroll the PagerDuty integration from the Teleport Web UI.
Visit the Teleport Web UI and click Access Management on the menu bar at the top of the screen.
On the left sidebar, click Enroll New Integration to visit the "Enroll New Integration" page:
On the "Select Integration Type" menu, click the tile for your integration. You will see a page with instructions to set up the integration, as well as a form that you can use to configure the integration.
This guide will explain how to set up Teleport's Access Request plugin for PagerDuty.
Prerequisites
-
A running Teleport cluster. If you want to get started with Teleport, sign up for a free trial.
-
The
tctl
admin tool andtsh
client tool.Visit Installation for instructions on downloading
tctl
andtsh
.
Recommended: Configure Machine ID to provide short-lived Teleport
credentials to the plugin. Before following this guide, follow a Machine ID
deployment guide
to run the tbot
binary on your infrastructure.
-
A PagerDuty account with the "Admin", "Global Admin", or "Account Owner" roles. These roles are necessary for generating an API token that can list and look up user profiles.
You can see your role by visiting your user page in PagerDuty, navigating to the "Permissions & Teams" tab, and checking the value of the "Base Role" field.
-
Either a Linux host or Kubernetes cluster where you will run the PagerDuty plugin.
-
To check that you can connect to your Teleport cluster, sign in with
tsh login
, then verify that you can runtctl
commands using your current credentials.For example:
tsh login --proxy=teleport.example.com --user=[email protected]tctl statusCluster teleport.example.com
Version 16.4.8
CA pin sha256:abdc1245efgh5678abdc1245efgh5678abdc1245efgh5678abdc1245efgh5678
If you can connect to the cluster and run the
tctl status
command, you can use your current credentials to run subsequenttctl
commands from your workstation. If you host your own Teleport cluster, you can also runtctl
commands on the computer that hosts the Teleport Auth Service for full permissions.
Step 1/8. Create services
To demonstrate the PagerDuty plugin, create two services in PagerDuty. For each service, fill in only the "Name" field and skip all other configuration screens, leaving options as the defaults:
Teleport Access Request Notifications
My Critical Service
We will configure the PagerDuty plugin to create an incident in the Teleport Access Request Notifications
service when certain users create an Access
Request.
For users on the on-call team for My Critical Service
(in this case, your
PagerDuty user), we will configure the PagerDuty plugin to approve Access
Requests automatically, letting them investigate incidents on the service
quickly.
Step 2/8. Define RBAC resources
The Teleport PagerDuty plugin works by receiving Access Request events from the Teleport Auth Service and, based on these events, interacting with the PagerDuty API.
In this section, we will show you how to configure the PagerDuty plugin by defining the following RBAC resources:
- A role called
editor-requester
, which can request the built-ineditor
role. We will configure this role to open a PagerDuty incident whenever a user requests it, notifying the on-call team for theTeleport Access Request Notifications
service. - A role called
demo-role-requester
, which can request a role calleddemo-role
. We will configure the PagerDuty plugin to auto-approve this request whenever the user making it is on the on-call team forMy Critical Service
. - A user and role called
access-plugin
that the PagerDuty plugin will assume in order to authenticate to the Teleport Auth Service. This role will have permissions to approve Access Requests from users on the on-call team forMy Critical Service
automatically. - A role called
access-plugin-impersonator
that allows you to generate signed credentials that the PagerDuty plugin can use to authenticate with your Teleport cluster.
editor-requester
Create a file called editor-request-rbac.yaml
with the following content,
which defines a role called editor-reviewer
that can review requests for the
editor
role, plus an editor-requester
role that can request this role.
kind: role
version: v5
metadata:
name: editor-reviewer
spec:
allow:
review_requests:
roles: ['editor']
---
kind: role
version: v5
metadata:
name: editor-requester
spec:
allow:
request:
roles: ['editor']
thresholds:
- approve: 1
deny: 1
annotations:
pagerduty_notify_service: ["Teleport Access Request Notifications"]
The Teleport Auth Service annotates Access Request events with metadata based on the roles of the Teleport user submitting the Access Request. The PagerDuty plugin reads these annotations to determine how to respond to a new Access Request event.
Whenever a user with the editor-requester
role requests the editor
role, the
PagerDuty plugin will read the pagerduty_notify_service
annotation and notify
PagerDuty to open an incident in the specified service, Teleport Access Request Notifications
, until someone with the editor-reviewer
role approves or denies
the request.
Create the roles you defined:
tctl create -f editor-request-rbac.yamlrole 'editor-reviewer' has been createdrole 'editor-requester' has been created
demo-role-requester
Create a file called demo-role-requester.yaml
with the following content:
kind: role
version: v5
metadata:
name: demo-role
---
kind: role
version: v5
metadata:
name: demo-role-requester
spec:
allow:
request:
roles: ['demo-role']
thresholds:
- approve: 1
deny: 1
annotations:
pagerduty_services: ["My Critical Service"]
Users with the demo-role-requester
role can request the demo-role
role. When
such a user makes this request, the PagerDuty plugin will read the
pagerduty_services
annotation. If the user making the request is on the
on-call team for a service listed as a value for the annotation, the plugin will
approve the Access Request automatically.
In this case, the PagerDuty plugin will approve any requests from users on the
on-call team for My Critical Service
.
Create the resources:
tctl create -f demo-role-requester.yaml;
For auto-approval to work, the user creating an Access Request must have a
Teleport username that is also the email address associated with a PagerDuty
account. In this guide, we will add the demo-role-requester
role to your own
Teleport account—which we assume is also your email address for PagerDuty—so you
can request the demo-role
role.
access-plugin
Teleport's Access Request plugins authenticate to your Teleport cluster as a user with permissions to list, read, and update Access Requests. This way, plugins can retrieve Access Requests from the Teleport Auth Service, present them to reviewers, and modify them after a review.
Define a user and role called access-plugin
by adding the following content to
a file called access-plugin.yaml
:
kind: role
version: v5
metadata:
name: access-plugin
spec:
allow:
rules:
- resources: ['access_request']
verbs: ['list', 'read']
- resources: ['access_plugin_data']
verbs: ['update']
review_requests:
roles: ['demo-role']
where: 'contains(request.system_annotations["pagerduty_services"], "My Critical Service")'
---
kind: user
metadata:
name: access-plugin
spec:
roles: ['access-plugin']
version: v2
Notice that the access-plugin
role includes an allow.review_requests.roles
field with demo-role
as a value. This allows the plugin to review requests for
the demo-role
role.
We are also restricting the access-plugin
role to reviewing only Access
Requests associated with My Critical Service
. To do so, we have defined a
predicate expression in the review_requests.where
field. This expression
indicates that the plugin cannot review requests for demo-role
unless the
request contains an annotation with the key pagerduty_services
and the value
My Critical Service
.
The where
field includes a predicate expression that determines whether a
reviewer is allowed to review a specific request. You can include two functions
in a predicate expression:
Function | Description | Example |
---|---|---|
equals | A field is equivalent to a value. | equals(request.reason, "resolve an incident") |
contains | A list of strings includes a value. | contains(reviewer.traits["team"], "devops") |
When you use the where
field, you can include the following fields in your
predicate expression:
Field | Type | Description |
---|---|---|
reviewer.roles | []string | A list of the reviewer's Teleport role names |
reviewer.traits | map[string][]string | A map of the reviewer's Teleport traits by the name of the trait |
request.roles | []string | A list of the Teleport roles a user is requesting |
request.reason | string | The reason attached to the request |
request.system_annotations | map[string][]string | A map of annotations for the request by annotation key, e.g., pagerduty_services |
You can combine functions using the following operators:
Operator | Format | Description |
---|---|---|
&& | function && function | Evaluates to true if both functions evaluate to true |
|| | function || function | Evaluates to true if either one or both functions evaluate to true |
! | !function | Evaluates to true if the function evaluates to false |
An example of a function is equals(request.reason, "resolve an incident")
. To
configure an allow
condition to match any Access Request that does not include
the reason, "resolve an incident", you could use the function,
!equals(request.reason, "resolve an incident")
.
Create the user and role:
tctl create -f access-plugin.yaml
access-plugin-impersonator
As with all Teleport users, the Teleport Auth Service authenticates the
access-plugin
user by issuing short-lived TLS credentials. In this case, we
will need to request the credentials manually by impersonating the
access-plugin
role and user.
If you are running a self-hosted Teleport Enterprise cluster and are using
tctl
from the Auth Service host, you will already have impersonation
privileges.
To grant your user impersonation privileges for access-plugin
, define a role
called access-plugin-impersonator
by pasting the following YAML document into
a file called access-plugin-impersonator.yaml
:
kind: role
version: v5
metadata:
name: access-plugin-impersonator
spec:
allow:
impersonate:
roles:
- access-plugin
users:
- access-plugin
Create the access-plugin-impersonator
role:
tctl create -f access-plugin-impersonator.yaml
Add roles to your user
Later in this guide, your Teleport user will take three actions that require additional permissions:
- Generate signed credentials that the PagerDuty plugin will use to connect to your Teleport Cluster
- Manually review an Access Request for the
editor
role - Create an Access Request for the
demo-role
role
To grant these permissions to your user, give your user the editor-reviewer
,
access-plugin-impersonator
, and demo-role-requester
roles we defined
earlier.
Open your user definition in an editor:
TELEPORT_USER=$(tsh status --format=json | jq -r .active.username)tctl edit users/${TELEPORT_USER?}
Edit the user to include the roles you just created:
roles:
- access
- auditor
- editor
+ - editor-reviewer
+ - access-plugin-impersonator
+ - demo-role-requester
Apply your changes by saving and closing the file in your editor.
Log out of your Teleport cluster and log in again. You will now be able to
review requests for the editor
role, request the demo-role
role, and
generate signed certificates for the access-plugin
role and user.
Create a user who will request access
Create a user called myuser
who has the editor-requester
role. Later in this
guide, you will create an Access Request as this user to test the PagerDuty
plugin:
tctl users add myuser --roles=editor-requester
tctl
will print an invitation URL to your terminal. Visit the URL and log in
as myuser
for the first time, registering credentials as configured for your
Teleport cluster.
Step 3/8. Install the Teleport PagerDuty plugin
Access Request Plugins are available as amd64
and arm64
Linux binaries for downloading.
Replace ARCH
with your required version.
curl -L -O https://cdn.teleport.dev/teleport-access-pagerduty-v16.4.8-linux-ARCH-bin.tar.gztar -xzf teleport-access-pagerduty-v16.4.8-linux-ARCH-bin.tar.gzcd teleport-access-pagerdutysudo ./install
Make sure the binary is installed:
teleport-pagerduty versionteleport-pagerduty v16.4.8 git:teleport-pagerduty-v16.4.8-fffffffff go1.22
docker pull public.ecr.aws/gravitational/teleport-plugin-pagerduty:16.4.8
Make sure the plugin is installed by running the following command:
docker run public.ecr.aws/gravitational/teleport-plugin-pagerduty:16.4.8 versionteleport-pagerduty v16.4.8 git:teleport-pagerduty-v16.4.8-api/14.0.0-gd1e081e 1.22
For a list of available tags, visit Amazon ECR Public Gallery.
To install from source you need git
and go
installed. If you do not have Go
installed, visit the Go downloads page.
git clone https://github.com/gravitational/teleport -b branch/v16cd teleport/integrations/access/pagerdutygit checkout 16.4.8make
Move the teleport-pagerduty
binary into your PATH.
Make sure the binary is installed:
teleport-pagerduty versionteleport-pagerduty v16.4.8 git:teleport-pagerduty-v16.4.8-fffffffff go1.22
Allow Helm to install charts that are hosted in the Teleport Helm repository:
helm repo add teleport https://charts.releases.teleport.dev
Update the cache of charts from the remote repository:
helm repo update
Step 4/8. Export the access plugin identity
Give the plugin access to a Teleport identity file. We recommend using Machine
ID for this in order to produce short-lived identity files that are less
dangerous if exfiltrated, though in demo deployments, you can generate
longer-lived identity files with tctl
:
Configure tbot
with an output that will produce the credentials needed by
the plugin. As the plugin will be accessing the Teleport API, the correct
output type to use is identity
.
For this guide, the directory
destination will be used. This will write these
credentials to a specified directory on disk. Ensure that this directory can
be written to by the Linux user that tbot
runs as, and that it can be read by
the Linux user that the plugin will run as.
Modify your tbot
configuration to add an identity
output.
If running tbot
on a Linux server, use the directory
output to write
identity files to the /opt/machine-id
directory:
outputs:
- type: identity
destination:
type: directory
# For this guide, /opt/machine-id is used as the destination directory.
# You may wish to customize this. Multiple outputs cannot share the same
# destination.
path: /opt/machine-id
If running tbot
on Kubernetes, write the identity file to Kubernetes secret
instead:
outputs:
- type: identity
destination:
type: kubernetes_secret
name: teleport-plugin-pagerduty-identity
If operating tbot
as a background service, restart it. If running tbot
in
one-shot mode, execute it now.
You should now see an identity
file under /opt/machine-id
or a Kubernetes
secret named teleport-plugin-pagerduty-identity
. This contains the private key and signed
certificates needed by the plugin to authenticate with the Teleport Auth
Service.
Like all Teleport users, access-plugin
needs signed credentials in order to
connect to your Teleport cluster. You will use the tctl auth sign
command to
request these credentials.
The following tctl auth sign
command impersonates the access-plugin
user,
generates signed credentials, and writes an identity file to the local
directory:
tctl auth sign --user=access-plugin --out=identity
The plugin connects to the Teleport Auth Service's gRPC endpoint over TLS.
The identity file, identity
, includes both TLS and SSH credentials. The
plugin uses the SSH credentials to connect to the Proxy Service, which
establishes a reverse tunnel connection to the Auth Service. The plugin
uses this reverse tunnel, along with your TLS credentials, to connect to the
Auth Service's gRPC endpoint.
By default, tctl auth sign
produces certificates with a relatively short
lifetime. For production deployments, we suggest using Machine
ID to programmatically issue and renew
certificates for your plugin. See our Machine ID getting started
guide to learn more.
Note that you cannot issue certificates that are valid longer than your existing credentials.
For example, to issue certificates with a 1000-hour TTL, you must be logged in with a session that is
valid for at least 1000 hours. This means your user must have a role allowing
a max_session_ttl
of at least 1000 hours (60000 minutes), and you must specify a --ttl
when logging in:
tsh login --proxy=teleport.example.com --ttl=60060
If you are running the plugin on a Linux server, create a data directory to hold certificate files for the plugin:
sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/teleport/api-credentialssudo mv identity /var/lib/teleport/plugins/api-credentials
If you are running the plugin on Kubernetes, Create a Kubernetes secret that contains the Teleport identity file:
kubectl -n teleport create secret generic --from-file=identity teleport-plugin-pagerduty-identity
Once the Teleport credentials expire, you will need to renew them by running the
tctl auth sign
command again.
Step 5/8. Set up a PagerDuty API key
Generate an API key that the PagerDuty plugin will use to create and modify incidents as well as list users, services, and on-call policies.
In your PagerDuty dashboard, go to Integrations → API Access Keys and click Create New API Key. Add a key description, e.g., "Teleport integration". Leave "Read-only API Key" unchecked. Copy the key to a file on your local machine. We'll use the key in the plugin config file later.
Step 6/8. Configure the PagerDuty plugin
At this point, you have generated credentials that the PagerDuty plugin will use to connect to Teleport and the PagerDuty API. You will now configure the PagerDuty plugin to use these credentials, plus adjust any settings required for your environment.
Teleport's PagerDuty plugin has its own configuration file in TOML format. On the host where you will run the PagerDuty plugin, generate a boilerplate config by running the following commands:
teleport-pagerduty configure > teleport-pagerduty.tomlsudo mv teleport-pagerduty.toml /etc
The PagerDuty Helm Chart uses a YAML values file to configure the plugin. On
the host where you have Helm installed, create a file called
teleport-pagerduty-values.yaml
based on the following example:
teleport:
address: "" # Teleport Auth Server GRPC API address
identitySecretName: "" # Identity secret name
identitySecretPath: "" # Identity secret path
pagerduty:
apiKey: "" # PagerDuty API Key
userEmail: "" # PagerDuty bot user email (Could be admin email)
The PagerDuty plugin expects the configuration to be in
/etc/teleport-pagerduty.toml
, but you can override this with the --config
flag when you run the plugin binary later in this guide.
Edit the configuration file in /etc/teleport-pagerduty.toml
as explained
below:
[teleport]
The PagerDuty plugin uses this section to connect to your Teleport cluster:
addr
: Include the hostname and HTTPS port of your Teleport Proxy Service
or Teleport Enterprise Cloud account (e.g., teleport.example.com:443
or
mytenant.teleport.sh:443
).
identity
: Fill this in with the path to the identity file you exported
earlier.
client_key
, client_crt
, root_cas
: Comment these out, since we
are not using them in this configuration.
address
: Include the hostname and HTTPS port of your Teleport Proxy Service
or Teleport Enterprise Cloud tenant (e.g., teleport.example.com:443
or
mytenant.teleport.sh:443
).
identitySecretName
: Fill in the identitySecretName
field with the name
of the Kubernetes secret you created earlier.
identitySecretPath
: Fill in the identitySecretPath
field with the path
of the identity file within the Kubernetes secret. If you have followed the
instructions above, this will be identity
.
If you are providing credentials to the plugin using a tbot
binary that runs
on a Linux server, make sure the value of identity
is the same as the path of
the identity file you configured tbot
to generate, /opt/machine-id/identity
.
Configure the plugin to periodically reload the identity file, ensuring that it does not attempt to connect to the Teleport Auth Service with expired credentials.
Add the following to the teleport
section of the configuration:
refresh_identity = true
[pagerduty]
Assign api_key
to the PagerDuty API key you generated earlier.
Assign user_email
to the email address of a PagerDuty user on the account
associated with your API key. When the PagerDuty plugin creates a new incident,
PagerDuty will display this incident as created by that user.
This guide has assumed that the Teleport PagerDuty plugin uses
pagerduty_notify_service
annotation to determine which services to notify of
new Access Request events and the pagerduty_services
annotation to configure
auto-approval.
If you would like to use a different name for these annotations in your Teleport
roles, you can assign the pagerduty.notify_service
and pagerduty.services
fields.
The final configuration should resemble the following:
# example teleport-pagerduty configuration TOML file
[teleport]
auth_server = "myinstance.teleport.sh:443" # Teleport Cloud proxy HTTPS address
identity = "/var/lib/teleport/plugins/pagerduty/identity" # Identity file path
refresh_identity = true # Refresh identity file periodically
[pagerduty]
api_key = "key" # PagerDuty API Key
user_email = "[email protected]" # PagerDuty bot user email (Could be admin email)
[log]
output = "stderr" # Logger output. Could be "stdout", "stderr" or "/var/lib/teleport/pagerduty.log"
severity = "INFO" # Logger severity. Could be "INFO", "ERROR", "DEBUG" or "WARN".
teleport:
# Teleport HTTPS Proxy web address, for Teleport Enterprise Cloud should be in the form "your-account.teleport.sh:443"
address: "teleport.example.com:443"
# Secret containing identity
identitySecretName: teleport-plugin-pagerduty-identity
# Path within the secret containing the identity file.
identitySecretPath: identity
pagerduty:
apiKey: "key" # PagerDuty API Key
userEmail: "[email protected]" # PagerDuty bot user email (Could be admin email)
log:
output: "stderr" # Logger output. Could be "stdout", "stderr" or "/var/lib/teleport/pagerduty.log"
severity: "INFO" # Logger severity. Could be "INFO", "ERROR", "DEBUG" or "WARN".
Step 7/8. Test the PagerDuty plugin
After you configure the PagerDuty plugin, run the following command to start it.
The -d
flag will provide debug information to ensure that the plugin can
connect to PagerDuty and your Teleport cluster:
teleport-pagerduty start -dDEBU DEBUG logging enabled logrus/exported.go:117
INFO Starting Teleport Access PagerDuty extension 0.1.0-dev.1: pagerduty/main.go:124
DEBU Checking Teleport server version pagerduty/main.go:226
DEBU Starting a request watcher... pagerduty/main.go:288
DEBU Starting PagerDuty API health check... pagerduty/main.go:170
DEBU Starting secure HTTPS server on :8081 utils/http.go:146
DEBU Watcher connected pagerduty/main.go:252
DEBU PagerDuty API health check finished ok pagerduty/main.go:176
DEBU Setting up the webhook extensions pagerduty/main.go:178
Run the plugin:
docker run -v <path-to-config>:/etc/teleport-pagerduty.toml public.ecr.aws/gravitational/teleport-plugin-pagerduty:16.4.8 start
After modifying your configuration, run the bot with the following command:
helm upgrade --install teleport-plugin-pagerduty teleport/teleport-plugin-pagerduty --values teleport-pagerduty-values.yaml
To inspect the plugin's logs, use the following command:
kubectl logs deploy/teleport-plugin-pagerduty
Debug logs can be enabled by setting log.severity
to DEBUG
in
teleport-pagerduty-helm.yaml
and executing the helm upgrade ...
command
above again. Then you can restart the plugin with the following command:
kubectl rollout restart deployment teleport-plugin-pagerduty
Create an Access Request
As the Teleport user myuser
, create an Access Request for the editor
role:
A Teleport admin can create an Access Request for another user with tctl
:
tctl request create myuser --roles=editor
Users can use tsh
to create an Access Request and log in with approved roles:
tsh request create --roles=editorSeeking request approval... (id: 8f77d2d1-2bbf-4031-a300-58926237a807)
Users can request access using the Web UI by visiting the "Access Requests" tab and clicking "New Request":
You should see a log resembling the following on your PagerDuty plugin host:
INFO Successfully created PagerDuty incident pd_incident_id:00000000000000
pd_service_name:Teleport Access Request Notifications
request_id:00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 request_op:put
request_state:PENDING pagerduty/app.go:366
In PagerDuty, you will see a new incident containing information about the Access Request:
Resolve the request
Once you receive an Access Request message, click the link to visit Teleport and approve or deny the request:
You can also review an Access Request from the command line:
Replace REQUEST_ID with the id of the request
tctl request approve REQUEST_IDtctl request deny REQUEST_ID
Replace REQUEST_ID with the id of the request
tsh request review --approve REQUEST_IDtsh request review --deny REQUEST_ID
When the PagerDuty plugin sends a notification, anyone who receives the notification can follow the enclosed link to an Access Request URL. While users must be authorized via their Teleport roles to review Access Request, you should still check the Teleport audit log to ensure that the right users are reviewing the right requests.
When auditing Access Request reviews, check for events with the type Access Request Reviewed
in the Teleport Web UI.
Trigger an auto-approval
As your Teleport user, create an Access Request for the demo-role
role.
You will see a log similar to the following on your PagerDuty plugin host:
INFO Successfully submitted a request approval
pd_user_email:[email protected] pd_user_name:My User
request_id:00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 request_op:put
request_state:PENDING pagerduty/app.go:511
Your Access Request will appear as APPROVED
:
tsh requests lsID User Roles Created (UTC) Status------------------------------------ ------------------ --------- ------------------- --------00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000 [email protected] demo-role 12 Aug 22 18:30 UTC APPROVED
Step 8/8. Set up systemd
This section is only relevant if you are running the Teleport PagerDuty plugin on a Linux host.
In production, we recommend starting the Teleport plugin daemon via an init system like systemd. Here's the recommended Teleport plugin service unit file for systemd:
[Unit]
Description=Teleport Pagerduty Plugin
After=network.target
[Service]
Type=simple
Restart=on-failure
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/teleport-pagerduty start --config=/etc/teleport-pagerduty.toml
ExecReload=/bin/kill -HUP $MAINPID
PIDFile=/run/teleport-pagerduty.pid
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
Save this as teleport-pagerduty.service
in either /usr/lib/systemd/system/
or another unit file load
path
supported by systemd.
Enable and start the plugin:
sudo systemctl enable teleport-pagerdutysudo systemctl start teleport-pagerduty