Set cloudwatch to publish to SNS and then subscribe an SQS queue to that SNS topic. Next, run this script with your queue and service-key arguments. This assumes that boto environment variables are set or ~/.boto exists.

sqs_to_pagerduty.py

import argparse
import json
import time

import requests
from boto.sqs import connect_to_region
from boto.sqs.message import RawMessage


def get_messages(queue, region='us-west-2'):
    c = connect_to_region(region)
    q = c.get_queue(queue)
    q.set_message_class(RawMessage)

    return q.get_messages()


def get_alert(msg):
    data = json.loads(msg.get_body())
    alert_data = json.loads(data['Message'])

    return alert_data


class PagerDuty:

    PAGERDUTY_API = 'https://events.pagerduty.com/generic/2010-04-15/create_event.json'

    def __init__(self, service_key):
        self.service_key = service_key

    def pagerduty_request(self, event_type, payload):
        payload['service_key'] = self.service_key
        payload['event_type'] = event_type
        requests.post(self.PAGERDUTY_API, data=json.dumps(payload))

    def trigger_alert(self, key, description):
        self.pagerduty_request('trigger', {'description': description,
                                           'incident_key': key})

    def trigger_resolve(self, key):
        self.pagerduty_request('resolve', {'incident_key': key})

    def process_alert(self, alert):
        key = alert['AlarmName']
        state = alert['NewStateValue']
        reason = alert['NewStateReason']
        if state == 'OK':
            self.trigger_resolve(key=key)
        else:
            self.trigger_alert(key=key,
                               description='%s: %s' % (key, reason))


def loop(queue, service_key):
    p = PagerDuty(service_key)
    while True:
        try:
            msgs = get_messages(queue)
            for m in msgs:
                p.process_alert(get_alert(m))
                m.delete()
        except Exception, e:
            p.trigger_alert(key='sqstopagerduty%s' % queue,
                            description='SQS to Pagerduty is broken: %s' % e)


        time.sleep(30)


if __name__ == '__main__':
    parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
    parser.add_argument('--queue', help='SQS queue name', required=True)
    parser.add_argument('--service-key',
                        help='Pagerduy service key', required=True)
    args = parser.parse_args()
    loop(args.queue, args.service_key)