jAlarms includes a module, jalarms-remote, which includes some components that can be used to set up an application containing an AlarmSender and with one or more listeners for remote connections, a sort of alarm server. This is very useful to allow non-JVM applications, such as Ruby/Perl/PHP/bash scripts, to send alarms.
The application you set up needs to have an AlarmSender implementation (typically an instance of AlarmSenderImpl) with the channels you want to use. It also needs at least one remote listener. It can be the Protobuf listener, which is contained in its own module, or another listener contained in the jalarms-remote module. Currently there are two listeners: An HTTP listener and a plain text socket listener.
The HTTP listener is really simple to set up: Just create an instance of com.solab.alarms.remote.HttpAlarmListener with the TCP port which will be used to listen for incoming connections, and start it by invoking the startListening() method.
The HTTP requests can be to any URL; the only thing that is required is that they have a query string with an "alarm" field, containing the alarm message to be sent, and optinally a "src" field, with the alarm source.
You can easily text the server with tools such as curl:
curl "http://host:port/?alarm=Some+message&src=alarm+source"
The text listener is also really simple, just create an instance of com.solab.alarms.remote.TextSocketListener with the TCP port which will be used to listen for incoming connections, and invoke startListening() to start listening for incoming connections.
The clients only need to open a TCP connection to the text server, send a line of text, and optionally wait for a response, which will usually be just "OK". In *NIX systems you can use the netcat tool, nc, like so:
echo "An alarm message"|nc host port
An alarm source can be specified by using a double-colon separator, for example source::message will be used to send message and use source as the alarm source.
