Building a Raspberry PI Circonus AlertBot

To a Site Reliability Engineer, one of the most important things is making sure that you get alerts as soon as events happen. Circonus provides many contact options, such as SMS, email, Slack, PagerDuty, or VictorOps. For me, if I’m not actively watching for alerts,I rely on my phone to do something to get my attention. On occasion, I may bump the mute switch on my iPhone, or the battery might run out, etc, etc. It’s rare, but it happens.

Folks that know me also know that I get a kick out of the Raspberry Pi. They run linux, they’re cheap, and they provide all those nice GPIO pins. So it was a good practical exercise to have a Raspberry Pi do some work for me. I decided to build a back up alerting tool for those times when I don’t see the alerts on my phone.

First I attached a pair of LEDs to the GPIO (one red, one green), along with appropriate resistors, one to GPIO pin 7, and one to pin 11. Then I attached a super obnoxious buzzer with a resistor to GPIO pin 24, and a momentary switch (button) to GPIO pin 26 along with a pullup resistor.

Then I wrote up a script in Perl that will poll the Circonus API for any sev1 alerts. The green light means no alerts, and the red light means something broke. And since I’m usually sleeping when it goes off, the buzzer accompanies the red light. This is as annoying as intended, and therefore the momentary switch will signal to the script to keep quiet.

I have a few improvements planned for this set up. My next task is to implement a cheap OLED display to provide some information about an alert. I’ve also thought about replacing the LEDs with a relay that could switch on something more robust, like a lamp or a motor, which might be useful in an office setting.

I’ll admit the script leaves room for a lot of improvement, and pull requests are welcome! Either way, pairing the Raspberry Pi with the Circonus API has been fun and productive. I imagine there are plenty other applications that could make use the two! Join the Circonus Labs slack community and you can share and discuss your ideas with our engineers and other Circonus users.

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