Hey everyone! I'm pretty new to the whole GRC automation space, and I've been diving headfirst into Tugboat Logic over the last few weeks. So far, it's been awesome for pulling together all our evidence and keeping our compliance audits on track. But I'm trying to stretch its legs a bit beyond the basics.
Here’s my situation: my team (we're a small devops + security group) really, really needs to know the instant something critical fails in Tugboat – like, if a control suddenly flips to "non-compliant" or a key piece of evidence is rejected. We live in PagerDuty. That’s where all our on-call alerts go, and it’s the guaranteed way to wake someone up at 2 AM if the sky is falling.
I saw that Tugboat Logic has webhooks, which is super cool! But I'm coming from a project management background, and my coding skills are... let's say, enthusiastic but basic. I've been playing with the webhook setup, and I *think* I've got a flow that works, but I'd love to run it by you all to see if I'm doing it right or if there's a better way.
Basically, I set up an outgoing webhook in Tugboat that fires to a tiny middleware service I built in Make (I use Make for a ton of workflow automation). That service takes the Tugboat payload, formats it into something more concise, and then triggers the PagerDuty API to create a high-urgency incident. It seems to be working for test events!
My big, lingering question is: what are the best events to listen for? I started with just the control failure events, but I'm wondering if I should also listen for audit log events like "critical change" or maybe even when a due date is imminent? How do you all decide what's truly "page-worthy" versus what's just a Slack notification? Also, how reliable have you found the webhook delivery to be? I'm a little paranoid about missing an alert because the webhook call failed silently.
I'd love to hear how others have set this up, or if you've connected Tugboat Logic to other alerting systems like Opsgenie or even a simple Slack -> PagerDuty integration. Any gotchas or lessons learned would be hugely appreciated! 😅
The middleware in Make is a smart move to handle the parsing and formatting, but you're adding a critical failure point and extra latency. If that Make workflow has a hiccup or hits a rate limit, your PagerDuty alert is dead. For something that's supposed to wake people up at 2 AM, I'd skip the middleman unless you absolutely need the transformation.
You can post the JSON payload from Tugboat's webhook test, and I can show you the exact Terraform code to create a PagerDuty event integration with a filter to catch the critical events directly. That way, your only dependency is PagerDuty's API being up, which it has to be anyway.
Been there, migrated that
I've tested a few webhook-to-PagerDuty flows, and I agree the middleware is a potential point of failure. However, Tugboat's webhook payload often needs some surgery before PagerDuty will accept it. A single AWS Lambda function with a minimal IAM role is a more robust middle ground than a full third-party platform.
You can implement a simple filter directly in that Lambda to only forward events where the `status` field equals "failed" or a severity field is "critical". This keeps the logic simple and maintainable. The Terraform approach user456 mentioned is great, but only if Tugboat's native payload structure aligns perfectly with PagerDuty's Events API v2 schema, which I've found it usually doesn't.
What's the structure of the JSON you're getting from Tugboat's test? The need for transformation dictates the architecture here.
You're spot-on about the single point of failure with Make. My experience mirrors that, and the latency point is critical for an on-call alert. The direct Terraform route is definitely the most resilient path if the payload fits.
I'd offer a caveat on the payload alignment, though. In my setup, Tugboat's webhook events needed a small transformation to map their `control_status` field to PagerDuty's `severity`. I still avoided a middleware by using PagerDuty's Event Transformer, which lets you write a small JavaScript snippet to reshape incoming webhooks. It keeps the dependency inside PagerDuty's own infrastructure.
If you do go the pure Terraform route, how are you planning to handle the filtering logic? Are you embedding it in the `event_rules` block of the `pagerduty_event_orchestration_integration`? I've found that syntax can get a bit tricky for anything beyond simple equality checks.
yaml is my native language