Maintaining Network Awareness with Twitter…

Wanted to try a fun experiment and feed my network management alerts to Twitter instead of my email. Now let me explain, I’m using this for the alerts that are between super critical that need my instant attention (and are emailed to me) and those that can simply sit and wait all weekend or more for my attention (i.e. when I feel like looking at the NMS screen). By sending some events to Twitter (its on my phone and TweetDeck is on my pc) I can maintain “network awareness” while tweeting J or on the go.

Using the dopplerVUE network management tool, all alerts can be sent to a .Net assembly. Since Twitter has an API this part was simple – email me and I’ll send you the necessary files so you can create updates with your own Twitter account information.

Here are the steps to implement a twitter feed (takes about 5 minutes).

The ABCs of adding a twitter feed to dopplerVUE
A. Update your system with the new twitter.dll and EventService.exe.config files
B. Create a Twitter action that can be re-used.
C. Define a rule that will use the Twitter action

A – Updating the dopplerVUE system
1. Add the twitter.dll to the //systechnologies/dopplerVUE/Server folder
2. Back up your existing //systechnologies/dopplerVUE/EventService.exe.config file and replace with the new one provided.
3. Edit the EventService.exe.config file user and password lines with your actual Twitter account username and password.
4. Preference>dopplerVUE System>dopplerVUE Services Then restart the dvEventService and dvDataService

Now the Twitter action is ready to use.

B - Create a reusable Twitter action
1. Expand the NetOps> Action tree
2. Right Click on Actions and select Create Action
3. Enter an Action Name
4. Select Action Type: Custom DLL
5. Enter the assembly value of: Twitter.dll
6. Select Create.

C- Define a rule that will use the Twitter action
1. Expand the NetOps>Metric>Rules tree
2. Right click on an existing rule and select edit
3. At step 5, expand the Custom DLL folder and select the Tweet This! Action
4. Select Finish.