AlienVault® USM Anywhere™

Sending USM Anywhere Notifications to PagerDuty

Role Availability Read-Only Analyst Manager

From USM Anywhere, you can send an alarm or event notification to your PagerDuty incident management console so that team members receive alerts. This facilitates communication and collaboration within the same messaging tool that your organization uses for incident responseIncident response is a business process or plan dictating how an organization handles security incidents such as a security breach or attack.. When you have this integration configured in USM Anywhere, you can create orchestration rules to automatically send these notifications when an eventAny traffic or data exchange detected by AT&T Cybersecurity products through a sensor, or through external devices such as a firewall. or alarmAlarms provide notification of an event or sequence of events that require attention or investigation. matches the rule criteria.

Edition: Notification integrations are available in the Standard and Premium editions of USM Anywhere.

See https://cybersecurity.att.com/pricing for more information about the feature and data support provided by each of the USM Anywhere editions.

PagerDuty provides a mechanism to create services that include integrations to its Events API as a way to post data from external sources into PagerDuty incidents. The service configuration determines how PagerDuty handles the incoming incident. You must first create the integration key for a PagerDuty service before you set up the configuration in USM Anywhere to send these notifications.

Note: A PagerDuty service typically represents an application, component, or team for opening incidents. If you already have a defined service and you want to incorporate USM Anywhere notifications with it, you can simply add a new integration to that service and use the parameters outlined in the following procedure.

To create a PagerDuty service and integration for USM Anywhere

  1. Log in to your PagerDuty account.
  2. In the top menu, select Configuration > Services.

  3. At the top of the page, click Add New Service.

  4. In the General Settings, enter a name for the new service (such as AT&T Cybersecurity).

  5. In Integration Settings, set the type and name for the integration.

    • Choose Use our API Directly and select Events API v2.
    • Enter an Integration Name (such as USM Anywhere).

    Define the new PagerDuty service and integration settings

  6. Set the Incident Settings and Incident Behavior according to how you want PagerDuty to handle the incidents (notifications) from USM Anywhere.
  7. Click Add Service.

  8. In the Integrations tab, copy the Integration Key for the new integration.

    Copy the PagerDuty integration key

    Make sure to copy the key value to a secured location.

After you have created the PagerDuty integration and copied the key, you can configure USM Anywhere for PagerDuty notifications. After this configuration is in place, any orchestration rules set up for PagerDuty notification will send the triggered notification to the PagerDuty service for incident handling.

To configure the connection between PagerDuty and USM Anywhere

  1. In the USM Anywhere web UI, go to Settings > Notifications.
  2. In the left navigation panel, click PagerDuty.

  3. In the PagerDuty integration key field, paste the key value that you copied from your PagerDuty service integration.

    Specify the PagerDuty integration key in USM Anywhere

  4. Click Save Credentials.

Create an orchestration rule to match new alarms or events and trigger a notification to your PagerDuty service. You can use an existing alarm or event with the desired characteristics to easily set the matching conditions for the rule.

To create an orchestration rule to trigger a PagerDuty notification

  1. Go to Activity > Alarms or Activity > Events.
  2. Click the alarm or event to open the details.

  3. Click Create Rule and select Create Notification Rule.

    Create a notification rule from the alarm details

  4. Enter the Rule Name and set the matching conditions you want for the rule.

    The Create Rule dialog box displays property values for the selected alarm or event that you can use to specify the match conditions. For more information, see Orchestration Rules.

  5. For Notification Method, select the PagerDuty option.

    Select the PagerDuty notification method for the orchestration rule

  6. At the bottom of the dialog box, set the rule condition parameters to specify the criteria for a matching alarm or event to trigger the rule.

    Set the matching conditions for triggering the rule

    • This section provides suggested property/value pairs from the selected alarm or event that you can use as conditions for the rule. Click the icon to delete the items that you do not want to include in the matching conditions. You can also add other conditions that are not suggested.
    • If you create the rule from the Rules page, you must use the Add Condition and Add Group functions to define the property/value pairs that you want to use as conditions for the rule.
    • At the bottom of the dialog box, click More to display the optional multiple occurrence and window-length parameters.

    Choose an operator and add one or more conditions to form the conditional expression. You can include a condition group to evaluate a subset of conditions. The Current Rule box displays the constructed expression in standard syntax. The box displays a red border if the expression is syntactically invalid as currently specified. A valid expression is required to save the rule definition.

    It is important to be considerate of how the chosen conditions will match the events and whether they will have the attributes necessary to perform the desired action; any conditions that are matched but lack the correct attributes will be skipped.

    Select the operator used to determine the match for multiple conditions.

    • Select AND to match all conditions.
    • Select OR to match any one condition.
    • Select AND NOT to exclude items matching all conditions after the first.
    • Select OR NOT to include all items that do not match any conditions after the first.

    Click Add Condition to add a condition. For each condition, specify the field name, evaluator, and value. If the evaluation returns true for the condition, it is a match.

    Click Add Group to add a condition group. A new group includes a condition and its own operator used to match the conditions within the group. You can nest condition groups.

    Specify the number of event or alarm occurrences that produce a match on the conditional expression to trigger the rule. The default value is 1. You can enter the number of occurrences or use the arrow to scroll the value up or down.

    USM Anywhere uses this in conjunction with the Length option to specify the number of occurrences within a time period that will trigger the rule. For example, you can define a rule to trigger for an unauthorized access attempt when a failed SSHProgram to securely log into another computer over a network, to execute commands in a remote machine, and to move files from one machine to another through Secure Copy (SCP). login occurs three times within a five minute window.

    Specify the length of the window to identify a match for multiple occurrences. Enter the number and choose a time unit value of seconds, minutes, or hours. This time period identifies the amount of time that transpires from the first occurrence to the last occurrence. If the number of occurrences is not met within this period, the rule does not trigger.

  7. Click Save Rule.

PagerDuty creates incidents for the service from the notifications that USM Anywhere sends. You can review and respond to these incidents from your PagerDuty incidents dashboard. When you expand the details for the incident, in the Client area, click the link to open the event or alarm in USM Anywhere.

Click the Client link to open the event or alarm in USM Anywhere