I've started working on a project making it easy to send alerts from Graphite. Previously at AWeber we had this problem as well but used Nagios (not that easy) which wasn't a great experience. Given that PagerDuty can handle the notification part (Yay APIs!) all that was left was reading Graphite's rawData output and triggering an alert.

Right now I'm testing it at SeatGeek running it on Heroku, the example of how to set up Graphite Pager on Heroku is small and straightforward. It has already helped detect a few problems before our other monitoring tools and (eventually) can alert on actual business metrics!

The alert format looks like:

Pretty Simple. It supports globbing with unique alerts for each metric. Graphite Pager can't determine a disappearing host from the glob, maybe in the future, but will set the alert for all metrics returned.