How to integrate an RSSFeed into Smarts

If you have already checked out our RapidWatcher product (you should! :), you are already familiar with how it can help you monitor various systems and take actions accordingly. You should also be familiar with RapidWatcher's status updates in the form of an RSS feed.
In this post, I will explain how an RSS feed from RapidWatcher can be used to create notifications in the Smarts server with the help of a simple RapidConnector adapter. The example can be modified to feeds other than RapidWatcher.

Building the solution

Once you have your RapidWatcher up and running, you can get the status information on managed systems by accessing the RSS feed URL (http://localhost:9191/RapidWatcher/ManagedObject/rssFeed) using a feed reader or browser. To see how a feed looks like, you can take a look at the RSS feed from the RapidWatcher demo.More...
RSS feed is of course an alternative to getting the same information via the web based user interface or the web services API.Here is a sample RSS feed from RapidWatcher.

As you might have guessed, I am monitoring both the RapidManager and the RapidWatcher application itself by polling their URLs.Next, I built the following RapidConnector adapter to periodically poll the RSS feed URL and create/clear Smarts notifications. The following diagram shows the RapidConnector components used in the adapter as they would be seen in the RapidConfigurator, the development environment for RapidConnector. Ready-to-use RapidConnector components make it possible to put together the functionality I need quickly.

Adapter Flow

The adapter consists of a Reader, several Transformers and a Writer. Following is the flow of data in this adapter:

• RSSReader reads the RSS feed from RapidWatcher and turns it into a standard RapidConnector Data Object. It only requires the polling interval and the URL of the RSS feed as configuration parameters, the rest is taken care of by the RSSReader.

• The XML sent as the RSS feed contains multiple “item”s under “channel” tag. Each item has the status information about a managed object and a data for creating or clearing a notification in the Smarts server. To process each of the items, we will use the Iterator transformer to turn each item into a Data Object.

• The name and the status of the managed object is in the [Down] - RapidManagerUI). By using the string manipulation methods in the Assignment transformer, we will parse the contents of the

• Correlation transformer provides a powerful correlation capabilities without requiring code development. Here, it will help us block the messages that are identical to past messages. For example, we want to filter out repeated “RapidManager Down”s since we don't want to keep updating the original notifications update time. Our goal is to stop processing Down messages for any given managed object until an Up message is received, which will trigger the adapter to clear the existing notification.

• RapidConnector provides a very simple mechanism to create/clear notifications in the Smarts server; no need to know the details of the Smarts API. To create/clear notifications we need to set the “Action” attributes and send to be used by the ICNotificationWriter. The minimum set of Action attributes we need to define are:

When you run this adapter and observe the Notification console of your Smarts server, you will see notifications created and cleared depending on the status of the managed objects monitored by RapidWatcher. Feel free to play with the RSS2Smarts1.zip to modify its behavior and let us know if you run into any problems. RapidConfigurator, the development tool I used in this post is available for download on iFountain website.
Have fun!