Access Requests with PagerDuty

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.

This guide will explain how to set up Teleport's Access Request plugin for PagerDuty.

Prerequisites

• 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.

We recommend installing Teleport plugins on the same host as the Teleport Proxy Service. This is an ideal location as plugins have a low memory footprint, and will require both public internet access and Teleport Auth Service access.

tsh login --proxy=teleport.example.com [email protected]
tctl status
Cluster  teleport.example.com
Version  12.1.1
CA pin   sha256:abdc1245efgh5678abdc1245efgh5678abdc1245efgh5678abdc1245efgh5678

tsh login --proxy=myinstance.teleport.sh [email protected]
tctl status
Cluster  myinstance.teleport.sh
Version  12.1.2
CA pin   sha256:sha-hash-here

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 PagerDuy 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-in editor role. We will configure this role to open a PagerDuty incident whenever a user requests it, notifying the on-call team for the Teleport Access Request Notifications service.
• A role called demo-role-requester, which can request a role called demo-role. We will configure the PagerDuty plugin to auto-approve this request whenever the user making it is on the on-call team for My 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 for My 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.yaml
role 'editor-reviewer' has been created
role '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;

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', 'update']
      - 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.

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 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.

Retrieve your user definition:

TELEPORT_USER=$(tsh status --format=json | jq -r .active.username)
tctl get users/${TELEPORT_USER?} > myuser.yaml

Edit myuser.yaml to include the roles you just created:

  roles:
   - access
   - auditor
   - editor
+  - editor-reviewer
+  - access-plugin-impersonator
+  - demo-role-requester

Apply your changes:

tctl create -f myuser.yaml

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

We currently only provide linux-amd64 binaries. You can also compile these plugins from source. You can run the plugin from a remote host or your local development machine.

curl -L -O https://get.gravitational.com/teleport-access-pagerduty-v12.1.1-linux-amd64-bin.tar.gz
tar -xzf teleport-access-pagerduty-v12.1.1-linux-amd64-bin.tar.gz
cd teleport-access-pagerduty
sudo ./install
Teleport PagerDuty Plugin binaries have been copied to /usr/local/bin
You can run teleport-pagerduty configure > /etc/teleport-pagerduty.toml to
bootstrap your config file.

Checkout teleport-plugins
git clone https://github.com/gravitational/teleport-plugins.git
cd teleport-plugins/access/pagerduty
make

docker pull public.ecr.aws/gravitational/teleport-plugin-pagerduty:12.1.1

helm repo add teleport https://charts.releases.teleport.dev

helm repo update

Step 4/8. Export the access plugin identity

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 for your plugin.

The format of the credentials depends on whether you have set up your network to give the plugin direct access to the Teleport Auth Service, or if all Teleport clients and services connect to the Teleport Proxy Service instead.

tctl auth sign --user=access-plugin --out=auth.pem

tctl auth sign --format=tls --user=access-plugin --out=auth

tctl auth sign --user=access-plugin --out=auth

kubectl create secret generic teleport-mattermost-identity --from-file=auth_id=auth.pem

tctl auth sign --user=access-plugin --out=auth

kubectl create secret generic teleport-mattermost-identity --from-file=auth_id=auth.pem

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-pagerduty configure > teleport-pagerduty.toml
sudo mv teleport-pagerduty.toml /etc

teleport:
  address: ""                 # Teleport Auth Server GRPC API address
  identitySecretName: ""      # Identity file path

pagerduty:
  apiKey: ""                  # PagerDuty API Key
  userEmail: ""               # PagerDuty bot user email (Could be admin email)

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:

The address and credentials you configure depend on whether your plugin can access the Auth Service directly:

[teleport]
addr = "teleport.example.com:443"
identity = "/var/lib/teleport/plugins/pagerduty/auth.pem"

[teleport]
addr = "localhost:3025"
client_key = "/var/lib/teleport/plugins/pagerduty/auth.key" # Teleport GRPC client secret key
client_crt = "/var/lib/teleport/plugins/pagerduty/auth.crt" # Teleport GRPC client certificate
root_cas = "/var/lib/teleport/plugins/pagerduty/auth.cas"   # Teleport cluster CA certs

teleport:
  address: "teleport.example.com:443"
  identitySecretName: teleport-plugin-pagerduty-identity

[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.

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/auth.pem"   # Identity file path

[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".

# example teleport-pagerduty configuration TOML file
[teleport]
auth_server = "example.com:3025"                            # Teleport Auth Server GRPC API address
client_key = "/var/lib/teleport/plugins/pagerduty/auth.key" # Teleport GRPC client secret key
client_crt = "/var/lib/teleport/plugins/pagerduty/auth.crt" # Teleport GRPC client certificate
root_cas = "/var/lib/teleport/plugins/pagerduty/auth.cas"   # Teleport cluster CA certs

[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:
  address: "teleportauth:3025"                            # Teleport Auth Server GRPC API address
  identitySecretName: teleport-plugin-pagerduty-identity  # Identity file path

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

teleport-pagerduty start -d
DEBU   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

helm upgrade --install teleport-plugin-pagerduty teleport/teleport-plugin-pagerduty --values teleport-pagerduty-values.yaml

kubectl logs deploy/teleport-plugin-pagerduty

kubectl rollout restart deployment teleport-plugin-pagerduty

Create an Access Request

As the Teleport user myuser, create an Access Request for the editor role:

• As an Admin
• As a User
• From the Web UI

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=editor
Seeking 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:

Replace REQUEST_ID with the id of the request
tctl request approve REQUEST_ID
tctl request deny REQUEST_ID

Replace REQUEST_ID with the id of the request
tsh request review --approve REQUEST_ID
tsh request review --deny REQUEST_ID

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 ls
ID                                   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

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-pagerduty
sudo systemctl start teleport-pagerduty

Feedback

If you have any issues with this plugin please create a GitHub issue.