ZXTMs like to Tweet Too

It would seem that not a day goes by without another social networking site appearing on the interweb. We're all familiar with My Space, Facebook, and Linked-In, but the latest craze sweeping the internet, and the Zeus office, is Twitter. Twitter is a micro-blogging site, which encourages its members to submit short blogs (no more than 140 characters), answering the simple question "What are you doing?"

Someone in the office (it may have been me), thought it would be a pretty cool idea to plug ZXTM's eventing system into Twitter, and let it tweet alerts, and status messages. A few minutes reading the Twitter API docs later....

#!/usr/bin/perl
 
use LWP;
 
my $username="Your Twitter User";
my $password="Your Twitter Pass";
 
# The below text will be prepended to your ZXTM's tweet
my $preStatus = "Cluster update: ";
 
my $updateURL="http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml";
my $browser = LWP::UserAgent->new;
 
my $message = join(" ", @ARGV);
$message =~ s/--eventtype=/$preStatus/;
 
$browser->agent('ZXTM Eventing System');
$browser->credentials(
	'twitter.com:80',
	'Twitter API',
	$username => $password
);
 
my $response = $browser->post( $updateURL, [ status => $message ] );
 
print $response->status_line;
print $response->content;

The above perl code, needs to be saved in a file called "twitter.pl", and then uploaded to your ZXTMs Catalog: Catalogs -> Extra Files -> Action Programs.

Once uploaded, you will need to point your browser at System -> Alerting and the click "Manage Actions". Next Create a new action called "Twitter", and set the type to be program.

On the next screen, ensure that the twitter.pl program is selected under Additional Settings.

Click either "Update", or "Update and Test", if you want ZXTM to tweet now, and then return to the Alerting screen.

You can now map any of your alerts to use the Twitter action. In my ZXTM I told it to send all events to Twitter, but you'll probably want to be more selective.

Enjoy your tweeting, and Merry Christmas!

Mark Boddington [Zeus Systems Engineering] 15 December 2008 7 comments