ComHub is an application designed to absorb lots of disparate incoming messages, and route them to the appropriate people. The inspiration for the program came from dealing with lots and lots of Nagios messages. Each facility being monitored needs to be setup with explicit notifications, and the service itself needs to be restarted when any change is made to this structure. ComHub is designed to get ALL messages from Nagios, and then do the processing itself.
Currently, the main method for receiving messages is an HTTP POST to the Messages controller. However, most of the thinking has been done to read an IMAP folder on a mail server, and process the messages that ComHub finds there.
Also currently, there are two ways of notifying Contacts of incoming messages. The first is good, old-fashioned email. The second is SMS through Twilio. Future options may include IM (to a Jabber server) and updates to a status.net server (like indenti.ca), which should be subscribable through RSS.
The general idea is that some mechanism will insert a Message into the system. The Message will be parsed, and the involved Contacts will be surmised. Each Contact will be checked to see if they are “on call.” If so, each of their Channels will be checked to see if it is active, each of their Words will be checked to see if they are subscribed, and each of their Patterns will be checked to see if that particular Message body is being filtered. Once the Notifications go out, various response codes can be transmitted with the Acknowledgment, and various actions can be taken based on this.
In the …/lib/ directory, you can find some files to help. First, there’s a script called ‘inject.rb’ that will POST a Message to the app for testing. (Yes, I realize that I should learn proper TDD. I’m getting to it.) Second, there’s the ‘notify_by_xml.rb’ script that I use in Nagios for sending Messages to the app in production.
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Finish email polling
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Move test scripts (in lib/) to proper tests
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Make nice with mobile browsers
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Make acknowledgments respond to the appropriate Nagios instance
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Implement confirmation of email delivery with read receipt (?)
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Make Keywords work as a hierarchical thing (editing page will be fun…)
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Add escalation paths
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Add security? (At least hide the ‘destroy’ buttons.)
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Add URL’s to email notifications to do more “stuff” than just suppress
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Add ability to make a call and play a recording through Twilio (?)
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Implement queing/retrying of failed messages
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Make a better panic message function (than just sending an SMS via SMTP)
So far, this app depends on:
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libxmpp4r-ruby
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libopenssl-ruby
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libmysql-ruby
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acts_as_nested_set (not really implemented yet)
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acts_as_state_machine (probably overkill)
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annotate_models (purely optional)
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twiliolib
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will_paginate
* Setup the repo * Create config/database.yml, config/local.yml, and config/initializers/session_store.rb from templates (and test/fixtures/channels.yml.template for testing). * Run `rake db:schema:load' * Configure Passenger Phusion for Apache2(?)
ComHub - A centralized notification dispatcher.
- Author
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David Krider (david.krider@thedatacave.com)
- Copyright
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Copyright © 2011, Data Cave, Inc. (www.thedatacave.com/)
- License
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Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the “License”); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an “AS IS” BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.