WatchMouse Laboratories

There are many hidden features* in the WatchMouse portal and today I’d like to tell you about such a small gem: Publish your monitor status to Twitter.

Some of our clients are very open about the status and performance of their services and website(s) and like to inform their users ASAP if there is an issue. Twitter is a perfect channel for that: we can tweet for you when there is an issue with your website and when it’s okay again.

To set it up in the WatchMouse portal, go to the ‘Contacts’ page and add a new contact, type “twitter”. Normally, you would just type your twitter account in the ‘Screen name’ field and you will get alerts via the Twitter DM (direct message). To have tweets in your public timeline, type your twitter account name, followed by a colon, and your twitter password (sorry, no oAuth yet**). Enter a name for this contact and save.

Now you can test this new contact by clicking on the test button in the contact overview, and a test tweet should show up in your Twitter timeline. Also, the message will show up in the message log page of the WatchMouse portal. Next: add this contact to a contact group, or create a group with this contact in it. This is not really required, but in most cases it is convenient to have an (escalation) group, where the first alert is sent to e.g. your cell phone, and if the issue remains, a Tweet is inserted in your timeline.

To finalise the set-up, select a monitor in the settings page, and assign the newly created contact or contact group to it, and you’re all done!

This all fits nicely with the Public Status Pages (PSP) features of WatchMouse: using PSP, the current status and the performance in the last seven days is reported. In fact, we combined both the PSP feature and the Twitter timeline option discussed above, and created API-status (http://api-status.com/) and the Twitter profile: @api_status

- Stan

Twitter: @stannie

*) You may ask: why do you hide features? Well… We don’t hide features on purpose, but we selectively bring new features to the portal, and sometimes decide not to make the portal more complex when the feature may be of interest only to a small portion of our users. So if you think ”wouldn’t it be convenient if …” we may already have it under the hood. And if not, we certainly would love to hear about it, so please open a ticket at our helpdesk to tell us!
**) Yes, we will add oAuth too. How many days left? See www.countdowntooauth.com