Python Webhook Voice Alerts: Phone Call Notifications with the requests Library

Python is used across a wide range of environments — system administration, DevOps, web applications, data processing. When a critical event occurs in these environments — a service crashes, an error threshold is exceeded, a process fails — the notification usually goes to email or Slack. If nobody is watching at night, that is not enough.

Calling the Alertalk webhook from Python is a matter of a few lines of code. If the requests library is installed, you can start immediately.

Basic Webhook Call

import requests

WEBHOOK_URL = "https://tr.alertalk.net/webhook/receive"
WEBHOOK_KEY = "your-alertalk-key-here"

def send_voice_alert(phone, message):
    headers = {
        "X-Webhook-Key": WEBHOOK_KEY,
        "Content-Type": "application/json"
    }
    payload = {
        "phone_number": phone,
        "error_message": message
    }
    response = requests.post(WEBHOOK_URL, json=payload, headers=headers)
    return response.status_code

This function can be added anywhere in your project. Call it when a critical condition is met.

Server Reachability Check

A script that checks whether a server or service is reachable and triggers a phone call if it is not:

import requests
import socket

WEBHOOK_URL = "https://tr.alertalk.net/webhook/receive"
WEBHOOK_KEY = "your-alertalk-key-here"
PHONE      = "5XXXXXXXXX"

def send_voice_alert(message):
    headers = {
        "X-Webhook-Key": WEBHOOK_KEY,
        "Content-Type": "application/json"
    }
    payload = {
        "phone_number": PHONE,
        "error_message": message
    }
    requests.post(WEBHOOK_URL, json=payload, headers=headers)

def check_server(host, port=80, timeout=5):
    try:
        sock = socket.create_connection((host, port), timeout=timeout)
        sock.close()
        return True
    except (socket.timeout, ConnectionRefusedError, OSError):
        return False

servers = [
    {"host": "192.168.1.10", "port": 80,   "name": "Web Server"},
    {"host": "192.168.1.20", "port": 3306, "name": "Database Server"},
    {"host": "192.168.1.30", "port": 443,  "name": "API Server"},
]

for server in servers:
    if not check_server(server["host"], server["port"]):
        send_voice_alert(
            f"{server['name']} is unreachable. "
            f"IP: {server['host']}, Port: {server['port']}"
        )

Catching Errors in Web Applications

Connecting critical exceptions to voice alerts in Flask or Django applications:

import requests
import traceback

WEBHOOK_URL = "https://tr.alertalk.net/webhook/receive"
WEBHOOK_KEY = "your-alertalk-key-here"
PHONE      = "5XXXXXXXXX"

def send_voice_alert(message):
    headers = {
        "X-Webhook-Key": WEBHOOK_KEY,
        "Content-Type": "application/json"
    }
    payload = {
        "phone_number": PHONE,
        "error_message": message
    }
    try:
        requests.post(WEBHOOK_URL, json=payload, headers=headers, timeout=10)
    except Exception:
        pass

def critical_operation():
    try:
        # Your critical operation here
        raise ValueError("Database connection lost")
    except Exception as e:
        send_voice_alert(f"Critical error: {str(e)}")
        raise

critical_operation()

CPU and Memory Monitoring

Monitoring system resources with psutil and sending an alert when a threshold is exceeded:

import requests
import psutil
import socket

WEBHOOK_URL    = "https://tr.alertalk.net/webhook/receive"
WEBHOOK_KEY    = "your-alertalk-key-here"
PHONE          = "5XXXXXXXXX"
CPU_THRESHOLD  = 90
MEM_THRESHOLD  = 85
HOSTNAME       = socket.gethostname()

def send_voice_alert(message):
    headers = {
        "X-Webhook-Key": WEBHOOK_KEY,
        "Content-Type": "application/json"
    }
    payload = {
        "phone_number": PHONE,
        "error_message": message
    }
    requests.post(WEBHOOK_URL, json=payload, headers=headers)

cpu = psutil.cpu_percent(interval=1)
memory = psutil.virtual_memory().percent

if cpu >= CPU_THRESHOLD:
    send_voice_alert(
        f"CPU alert: CPU usage on {HOSTNAME} is at {cpu} percent."
    )

if memory >= MEM_THRESHOLD:
    send_voice_alert(
        f"Memory alert: Memory usage on {HOSTNAME} is at {memory} percent."
    )

Running Automatically with Cron

Add the script to cron to run every 5 minutes:

*/5 * * * * /usr/bin/python3 /opt/scripts/system_alert.py >> /var/log/system_alert.log 2>&1

Python Alert Scenarios

Who Is This For?

Ideal for developers, DevOps engineers and system administrators who work with Python. A few lines of code added to an existing Python script is all it takes to set up voice alerting. Particularly useful for custom monitoring scenarios or application-level alerts where a full monitoring stack is not justified.

Setup Guide

For creating an Alertalk account and getting your webhook key:

Webhook Integration Documentation

Try Alertalk for Free