I wanted my Home Assistant to be able to notify me, but I also wanted:
- De-duplication: I don’t want to get spammed with notifications all night if I disconnect a camera
- Escalation: I want to be able to notify my wife of issues like “There’s water on the basement floor” but only when I’ve ignored the notification for 15 minutes.
Rather than complicate my automations and scripts that emit the notifications, I decided to use a free level PagerDuty account. I’m an SRE and painfully familiar with how good it is at automagically handling escalation and deduplication.
Anyway, if you’re interested, I wrote it up on my blog
TL;DR - This details how to use a rest_command to hit PagerDuty’s API from Home Assistant. There’s a free level of account, so it won’t cost anything to use.