PagerDutySays TTS Service

PagerDutySays is a PHP Text-To-Speech (TTS) service endpoint for Pager Duty Webhooks. PagerDuty is a great service for notifying who's on call. The only problem for our hosting services team was, if your not on call, you don't get not notified. I'd only know if something was wrong when I randomly checked DataDog or someone shot me an email.

This is where Pager Duty Webhooks come in handy. A webhook will be triggered upon any interesting event that occurs within a service. You can set a webhook for individual services which is great if you only want to be notified when say Pingdom sends an alert out..

Rather than your traditional email or text message, we wanted a verbal notification of what happened. Since I have a mac and a couple airport expresses throughout the office, I thought why not build a text-to-speech endpoint that will say what happened. Enter PagerDutySays, a PHP-based text-to-speach notification endpoint that runs almost out-of-the-box on Mac OSX. It executes the built-in OSX program /usr/bin/say and "says" the notifications summary status for a triggered alert out loud through your speakers or through AirPlay! So for example, if I set a webhook for the pingdom service and a website goes down, my computer speaks to me out loud: "DOWN alert: testing (www.testing.com) is DOWN".

Audio Sample

Requires

Mac OS 10.8.5, 10.9
PHP 5.3+ (comes with mac osx)
say (Speech Synthesis Manager - comes with mac osx)
Apache 2.x (optional)
PagerDuty Account with appropriate privledges

Installation for Mac OSX 10.9

setup your webserver and ensure you can receive requests: http://brianflove.com/2013/10/23/os-x-mavericks-and-apache/
clone git@github.com:avatarnewyork/pagerdutysays.git into your webroot
make sure pagerdutysays directory has proper permissions (you can verify this by making a request to index.php. If successful, you should see a 200 status in your access log)
Login to PagerDuty
Goto Services and click on the service you wish to be notified on
Click Add a webhook button
Type in the name 'pagerdutysays' and enter the URL or IP of your webserver followed by /pagerdutysays/index.php. (for example: http://mymac.mydomain.com/pagerdutysays/index.php)
Bump up the volume!

Enable AirPlay

If you want to enable AirPlay, just edit the index.php file like below:

Use RunScope for testing

If you don't have a Domain Name or static IP or the ability to change your firewall settings, you can use Runscope's Passageway service to temporarily get around it. It allows you to use a public URL provided by Runscope to pipe the web request to your local development environment by using some magical python code.

Caveats

There is NO built-in security. This script is highly insecure as it executes the say program on your Mac, please treat it as such. It's highly recommended you ensure you have setup proper restrictions and firewall settings on your server. Ensure only pagerduty has access to this URL after you have verified it works.

Contributing

If you wish to contribute to this project, please be sure to checkout the development branch. We will only accept pull requests made in this branch.