Track Stocks and Get Alerted With Lambda, DataDog, and PagerDuty

How I created a tool to help me track stock prices, and get notified if there is any major change in the prices.

In this post, I’ll cover how I used AWS Lambda, DataDog, and PagerDuty to create a Stock Tracker tool, and show you how you can build one too!

To get us started here’s a picture of what we’re going to build:

At a high level, our tool will:

1. Query some stock data from an API provider named AlphaVantage
2. Reformat and send that stock data to DataDog where we will be able to see some visualizations of the data
3. Let PagerDuty know if our data crosses a threshold so that it can notify us

First, we’ll need to write some code to pull stock data from AlphaVantage.

The function get_stock_quotewill allow us to fetch data from AlphaVantage’s API. Read more about their documentation and how to get your API_KEY here. Ensure that you create an environment variable for API_KEY using the command export API_KEY="your-api-key" in order for this code to run.

Now it’s time to think about how we are going to be able to send this wonderful stock data that we have collected to DataDog. Reading up on this blog post by DataDog tells us that they have two helper functions for us to use datadog_lambda_wrapper and lambda_metric.

Adding these functions to our code we have:

Starting from the top, we added a new function track_metric. This function uses the function we get from DataDog lambda_metric to send our data.