Sending Tweets and Direct Messages on Twitter with NetCrunch

In some cases you need an efficient way to quickly let your users know that your service is temporarily unavailable or is back running. The fastest way to inform them is usually via your social media channel. Now NetCrunch is able to do this automatically: this article will explain how to configure NetCrunch to send a public Tweet or a direct Twitter message from your maintenance staff to all or selected Twitter followers.

This article is about how to configure NetCrunch to send public Tweets or Direct Messages to your followers on Twitter.

Enable NetCrunch to post on Twitter

To enable NetCrunch to post important alerts directly to your Twitter account, you need to first set up an Integration Profile for Twitter. To do so, click Monitoring Integration Profiles at the top of the NetCrunch application.

In the editor, the new Integration Profile needs to be named and you will be asked for the Consumer Key and Secret, and the Access Token Key and Secret. To configure those Keys and Secrets, please visit: Application Owner Access Tokens and follow the instruction to generate a token. In the Twitter application window, create a new application by entering a Name and Description. The Website URL can be any URL you would like to put in here, it can be your service URL, or for the testing purposes you can simply use https://www.google.com.

In your newly created application on Twitter, click the Tab labeled "Keys and Access Tokens" and copy your Consumer Key and Consumer Secret from this page to your NetCrunch Integration Profile. Here you can also create your Access Token and Secret by clicking on Create my access token.

Integration Profile

Create an alert to send messages via Twitter

To allow NetCrunch to utilize our Twitter integration, it's necessary to create an alerting script or edit an already existing one. Below we will show you how to create a new one for this example:

  • Click Monitoring Alerting Escalation Scripts
  • In the Alerting Scripts window click Add Alerting Script
  • Click Add and select Action to Run Immediately
  • Click the Integrations tab and select Twitter Message
Create alerting Script

The new window that appears will not give you much to configure. Simply decide if you want to send a Tweet or a Direct message to a specific person. If you want to send a Direct Message to someone, you have to include their Twitter handle. Make sure that they have the ability to receive messages that come from your account. Also, ensure that you are using the correct Integration Profile.

Test sending Tweets or Direct Messages by clicking Test. A test window will appear and if everything is configured properly, the test should finish with "Successfully executed" notification. A test message should now also appear either as Tweet or as a private message to your recipient.

Test the Integration

If this alerting script is now assigned to various alerts, NetCrunch will send Tweets or Direct Messages every time an alert is generated. If you have a large number of followers, a Tweet may be a more reasonable option here.

Of course, there is a limit to the number of characters that can be tweeted. If the message sent by NetCrunch is too long, it will automatically be shortened to the longest possible one and (...) will be added at the end of the truncated message. This is the reason why we recommend a short message format such as short-txt or sms-txt for Tweets.

Too much text

integrationtwitter

NetCrunch Network Monitoring

Network Maps, Dashboards, and Alerts.
Monitor anything. Network, cloud, config.

DownloadPricing