Webhooks: Monitoring Your Digital Signage Status in Real Time

Running a digital signage network means keeping dozens—or hundreds—of screens online and displaying the right content at the right time. Downtime happens: a loose cable, internet glitch, power issue, or software freeze. The last thing you want is to discover a blank screen hours later during a busy day.

Play Digital Signage tackles this head-on with webhooks, giving you real-time notifications whenever a screen's status changes. Instead of refreshing your dashboard endlessly, let webhooks push alerts straight to your tools, apps, or team chat. It's proactive monitoring that saves time and headaches.

Why Real-Time Status Monitoring Matters

Digital signage isn't set-it-and-forget-it. Screens in stores, offices, schools, or restaurants need to stay live to deliver messages, promotions, or information. When one goes offline:

• Customers miss key updates
• Brands lose visibility
• Revenue opportunities slip away

Traditional dashboards show status, but you have to check them. Webhooks flip that: events trigger automatic HTTP POST requests to your chosen endpoint the moment something changes—like a screen going offline, coming back online, or reporting an error.

This means faster response. Catch issues in seconds, not hours. For multi-location setups, it's a game-changer—central teams get pinged instantly about problems at remote sites.

How Webhooks Work in Play Digital Signage

Play Digital Signage's webhook system is built for simplicity and power. You set up an endpoint (your server, Zapier, Make.com, Slack, Microsoft Teams, email service—whatever fits). Then, in your Play account, configure which events to monitor:

• Screen goes offline
• The screen comes back online
• Connectivity drops or restores
• Other status shifts (like app version changes or errors)

When an event fires, Play sends a payload with details: screen name, UID, timestamp, previous/online status, maybe last known IP or model. Your endpoint receives it and acts—log it, notify the team, trigger a reboot script, or even alert via SMS.

It's event-driven, so no polling drains resources. Lightweight, secure (use HTTPS), and customizable. Combine it with Play's dashboard for the full picture: real-time views plus instant pushes.

Taking Monitoring Further with Popular Tools

Play Signage allows users to create webhooks for sending notifications to their preferred platforms. A webhook is triggered whenever a screen goes online or offline. In this blog post, we’ll walk through how to set up webhooks, with practical examples for Slack and PagerDuty.

Each webhook payload can include additional data such as the screen name, UID, event time (UTC), event status (connected or disconnected), and event type (online or offline).

To set up a webhook, you first need to enable screen alerts. Go to Alerts and toggle alerts on. Once alerts are enabled, the Webhook button becomes active, and you can configure your webhook.

Slack

1. To integrate a webhook with Slack, you’ll first need to create a Slack app.

• Start by heading to https://api.slack.com/apps and signing in to your Slack account.
• From there, click Create New App, choose From scratch, give your app a name, and select the workspace where it will be installed. Once the app is created, you’ll be taken to the app settings page.

2. Configuring the Slack webhook

• In the app settings, open Incoming Webhooks from the left-hand menu and enable it using the toggle in the top-right corner.
• Once enabled, Slack will reveal additional options. Click Add New Webhook and select the channel where you’d like webhook messages to be delivered. 
• After selecting the channel, Slack will generate a webhook URL — keep this handy, as you’ll need it in Play Signage.

3. Configuring the webhook in Play Digital Signage

• In your Play Digital Signage account, go to Alerts, enable alerts for the selected screen, and click the Webhook button for the screen where you want the webhook to be triggered.
• Paste the Slack webhook URL into the dialog. You’ll see an example payload — make sure to change the "message" field to "text", as this is how Slack recognizes incoming webhook messages.
• Click Test to confirm everything is working. If the setup is correct, a message will appear in the selected Slack channel. Once the test passes, click Save.

That’s it — your webhook is now live and ready to keep you on track with your screen statuses.

If you’d like to dive deeper into Slack webhooks, then Slack’s documentation is a great place to start: https://docs.slack.dev/messaging/sending-messages-using-incoming-webhooks/

PagerDuty

1. Create a service in PagerDuty

To integrate a webhook with PagerDuty, you’ll first need to create a service that will receive events.

• Start by signing in to your PagerDuty account and navigating to Services.
• Click New Service, give it a name (for example, Play Digital Signage Alerts), and assign an Escalation Policy.
• Select Events API v1 in the next step from the searchable dropdown menu and click Create Service.

2. Configure the PagerDuty Events API integration

• Once the service is created, you’ll be taken to its configuration page.
• PagerDuty will generate an Integration Key and an Integration URL.
• Keep this key handy — you’ll need it when configuring Play Digital Signage.

3. Configure the webhook in Play Digital Signage

In your Play Digital Signage account:

• Go to Alerts
• Enable alerts for the selected screen
• Click the Webhook button for the screen where you want PagerDuty incidents to be triggered
• Paste the PagerDuty Integration URL, in the Webhook URL input field

You will have to set these keys in your webhook body:

Use the Test button to verify the setup.
If everything is configured correctly, a new incident will appear in PagerDuty.

Once the test passes, click Save.

4. What happens next

When a screen alert is triggered:

• PagerDuty creates an incident
• The incident follows your escalation policy
• On-call responders are notified via their configured channels (mobile, SMS, email, etc.)

This ensures critical screen issues are surfaced immediately and acted on without delay.

If you’d like to learn more, PagerDuty’s Events API documentation is a great place to start: https://developer.pagerduty.com/docs/events-api-v1-overview

This turns signage glitches into managed incidents with escalation policies, acknowledgments, and post-mortems—perfect for enterprise reliability.

Webhooks complement Play's core features like remote control, scheduling, and hardware support, adding that extra layer of active monitoring.

In the end, webhooks make your digital signage smarter and more resilient. Setup takes minutes, but the uptime gains and reduced stress last forever. Jump into your Play account, add a webhook (or two), and start getting those instant alerts today. Your screens—and your team—will be better for it.

See our tutorials at Alerts/webhooks.