Twitter you alerts with SCOM 2007 R2

Thinking about ways to be notified by OpsMgr we where talking about Twitter this afternoon, can SCOM twitter alerts and state changes and what can be the use. Why do we want to use twitter to be notified?
One thing was clear in a sec it would be cool to let SCOM twitter in the first place! Second of all Twitter is fast and you just need a internet connection. But you don’t want everybody to read your alerts, warnings with domain names and ip addresses will expose company data to everyone to see, but if you protect your Twitter account where you have to accept your followers you can manage the alert receivers. So think about the security risk before you let SCOM Tweet your alerts.



What can be nice is to create multiple twitter accounts and subscription channel to Twitter for just the exchange admin’s or de AD guys to get the alerts fast and don’t have the SCOM console open all day (every phone has an Twitter app so no problem there).
So how can i make my SCOM 2007 R2 Twitter alerts?
It’s not really difficult to do so you got to have internet access a Twitter account with password and cUrl.
You have to obtain cUrl from the following location for you system, both x64 and x32 are available here so choose the one you need.
Copy cUrl into you c:\windows\system32 directory and cUrl will be available.
I’ve created a Twitter account wwwally_OpsMgr with a password which in the example will be password.
First test from a command line if cUrl is working from you SCOM RMS server to make sure it will works.

curl --basic --user wwwally_OpsMgr:password --data status="I'm twittering from #SCOM!!" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml
If your response looks like this your all set to go!

Now you can start creating the SCOM Twitter Channel which you can use to tweet you alerts.
In the OpsMgr console open the Administration pane and navigate to Notifications / Channels and create a new channel.

In the settings pane of the command notification channel wizard use the following settings:

1. In the Full path use: C:\windows\system32\curl.exe
2. In the Command line parameters use: --basic --user wwwally_OpsMgr:password --data status="$Data/Context/DataItem/AlertName$!" http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml
3. In the Startup folder use: C;\windows\system32
4. Click Finish to create the notification channel.

Now your done setting up the Twitter notification channel and you can start connecting it to the subscriptions.
For more information on how to create the subscription and subscribers have a look at: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd440890.aspx