An Custom Python SMS/E-mail Alert Manager using the Google Calendar API's

Hi all,

This week I was working on a recommendation engine project (By the way it is the activity that I am focused on for about two months) and I faced a simple problem during the deploy. Since I was the administrator responsible for the execution of the scripts scheduled for processing the recommendations  it was important to me to be alerted whether the execution of these scripts was successful or a failure.  I haven't searched deeply more for a solution in the web so I decided to develop a simple script in python that would solve my problem in a fast way.

Here in the company we have a custom e-mail responsible for receiving and sending any kind of e-mails related to problems or reports about the operation of the website.  Since the e-mail was an account registered at Google Webmail, I remembered that I could use the Google Calendar Reminders/Events features for this task. 

How did I manage that ? 

Simple, first I looked for the GoogleCalendar APIs and found a API written in Python that could help me. The API is gdata and can be downloaded at this link. After I wrote this simple script generic enough for any kind of events that could send me an e-mail or  a text message to my cellphone anytime that the server scripts faced some problems during their execution.

Using the gdata API, the idea is to set an event to start after 1 hour and 15 minutes after the problem occurred (so if the problem occurred now, I would put probably in the except clause to set this event to start 1 hour and 15 min later).  The script also set a reminder that it is defined by the number of minutes before the event start that you want to be alerted of. So by the default I put 60 minutes (1 hour) before the event (but you can change if the problem occurred is a critical issue).  If you pay attention, you will receive the message, in this case, 15 minutes after the problem happened at the server.  In other words, it is the difference between the Start Time and the Reminder Time  (75 - 60 = 15 min).  

So after 15 minutes, you receive an alert (SMS message at your cellphone registered of course at the Google Calendar and an email if you set up with the message that you define).

I know it isn't a sophisticated solution and maybe there are other solutions out there better than this one. But it solved my problem with a few of lines of code and uses the Google Infrastructure to handle with the SMS/E-mail manager with no costs. It is a simple solution special for system analysts that want to monitor the statuses of their databases or servers.    

I've put the code in Github and is totally open-source. I expect it may help anyone facing this problem and wants a simple solution for an e-mail/text message report manager!

Link for Github Project.

That's all! Any suggestions or improvements feel free to comment or ask!

Marcel Caraciolo