Connect APVISO with PagerDuty

How APVISO Integrates with PagerDuty

APVISO's PagerDuty integration ensures that your most severe vulnerability discoveries trigger immediate human response. While most pentest findings can wait for the next sprint cycle, Critical vulnerabilities — active SQL injection on a production endpoint, authentication bypasses, or remote code execution — demand urgent attention. PagerDuty's alerting infrastructure ensures the right person is notified within minutes.

When Alerting Matters Most

Traditional penetration testing delivers a report days or weeks after the engagement. If a critical vulnerability is discovered on day one of a week-long assessment, the development team does not learn about it until the final report arrives. APVISO changes this entirely — vulnerabilities are reported in real-time as they are discovered.

The PagerDuty integration takes this a step further. When APVISO's scanner agent confirms a Critical vulnerability and the reporter agent documents it, a PagerDuty event is fired within seconds. Your on-call security engineer receives a phone call, push notification, or SMS with the vulnerability details and a link to the full finding. This transforms vulnerability response from a batch process into a real-time workflow.

Severity-Based Incident Routing

Not every vulnerability warrants paging someone at 2 AM. APVISO lets you configure precisely which severity levels trigger PagerDuty actions:

• Critical findings: Create a PagerDuty incident with high urgency, triggering the full escalation policy with phone calls and SMS
• High findings: Create a PagerDuty alert with low urgency, which notifies via push notification and email but does not escalate aggressively
• Medium findings: Optionally create suppressed events that are visible in PagerDuty for context but do not trigger any notifications
• Low findings: Excluded from PagerDuty entirely, managed through your issue tracker integration

This tiered approach ensures your team is alerted proportionally to the risk. Critical findings get immediate human attention. High findings are visible to the on-call engineer during their next check-in. Lower-severity issues flow through standard project management channels.

Incident Deduplication and Grouping

When APVISO runs a comprehensive scan and discovers multiple Critical findings, you do not want your on-call engineer receiving ten separate pages. APVISO uses PagerDuty's deduplication keys to group related findings intelligently:

• Multiple findings from the same scan can be grouped into a single incident, with each finding added as an alert on that incident
• If the same vulnerability is re-discovered in a subsequent scan while the original incident is still open, APVISO adds a note to the existing incident rather than creating a new one
• Different vulnerability types are kept as separate incidents, since they likely require different responders

PagerDuty's event orchestration can further customize this grouping based on your operational needs — for example, grouping by affected service or vulnerability category.

Rich Incident Context

The PagerDuty incident includes structured data that gives responders immediate context without needing to open the APVISO dashboard:

• Vulnerability title and type (e.g., "SQL Injection in /api/users endpoint")
• Severity rating and CVSS score
• Affected URL with HTTP method
• Brief description of the vulnerability and its potential impact
• Direct link to the full APVISO finding with reproduction steps and evidence

This context is available in the PagerDuty mobile app, web interface, and any downstream tools that consume PagerDuty incident data. Responders can make an initial risk assessment from the alert itself before diving into the details.

Auto-Resolution on Fix Verification

The integration supports a complete incident lifecycle. When a developer patches the vulnerability and APVISO runs a targeted retest, a successful verification automatically sends a resolve event to PagerDuty. The incident is closed with a resolution note including the retest timestamp and confirmation that the vulnerability is no longer exploitable.

This automated resolution is particularly valuable for tracking mean-time-to-resolve (MTTR) metrics. PagerDuty's analytics show exactly how long each critical vulnerability was open — from APVISO's discovery to verified remediation — providing concrete data for security posture reporting.

Integration with Broader Incident Response

PagerDuty often sits at the center of an incident response workflow. APVISO's PagerDuty events can trigger runbooks, create war rooms in Slack or Teams via PagerDuty's response plays, and update status pages. For organizations with mature incident response processes, a Critical APVISO finding can automatically initiate the full incident response procedure — assembling responders, opening a communication channel, and tracking resolution steps — all triggered by the initial vulnerability discovery.