Twitter Based Alert System

We were in need of an alert system for our system in order to notify relevant parties of any errors which would occur in our production servers. There was already an email alert system in place but hey you have to admit no one is going to be checking emails 24x7 yea? :) ... We needed a solution like getting an SMS to our support team's phone, but we didnt have any SMS gateway available.

So thinking in the same lines i came up with a solution which enabled us to receive an SMS whenever an error occurred in our production systems. The solution was not a complex one and was very easy to implement with Spring 3 support.

The implemented solution was first we created a twitter account for our application and made the tweets private and followers to be authenticated. We dont want the whole world to know of the errors in our system now do we :) ... Then there was a very comprehensive tutorial available in Spring which you can find here which shows how to easily publish messages to your twitter account using Spring Integration. I honestly felt it was very easy to adapt with minimal changes.

Afterwards we created a twitter account for our support staff and followed the twitter account created for the application and enabled mobile alerts for that account. So now whenever an error occurs the application publishes the message via Spring's twitter plugin and consequently the support staff receives an update to their phones because we enabled mobile alerts on that specific account.

Now we have a fully fledged SMS based alert system without any cost involved. Someone somewhere said the best solution was almost always the simplest solution, i got to admit they were right on the money on that..

Cheers folks!!!!