One problem with creating very useful apps sometimes is that you end up making more work or trouble for yourself 🙂 My QuickMon tool has been created to help me monitor some services and ‘stuff’ which alerts me if things go pear shape… That is all good and wonderful until you (me) realize I’m beginning to ‘spam’ myself with too many messages (since I’m using smtp alerts…). Now they are all ‘valid’ alert messages and I still need to be aware of them but at some point there are just too many individual messages flying around. QuickMon alerts are quite configurable and if you want to some suppression is possible but managing this is almost a job on its own since things change with time, conditions change etc. etc. etc.

So I started thinking (an act that in itself could be dangerous at times) about how to solve the problem by grouping messages before they get sent. QuickMon itself raise alerts and immediately send them off – fire and forget style. Sure, I can build a new notifier that tries to do some batching (not sure how I can do that yet) or modify the QuickMon service itself to ‘hold on’ to alerts for time periods but that won’t be a generic solution any more. A better solution is to build a separate ‘generic’ solution that can also be used from QuickMon plus any other apps I might still create that need smtp messages to be sent out automatically (system level stuff).

This is where the idea of the MailAggregator service started. In itself it is a very simple thing – it runs, periodically checking for all messages from some ‘source’ that need to be send to the same destination, groups them as one message and sends it. The ‘source’ could be a database table or directory with files (or possibly any other place that can store a bunch of messages that can be retrieved at one time. For my own proof of concept I created a simple working example that checks for text files in a directory, use the content as the message content, group/append it, send it and then either deletes or renames the original files.

I decided to make the service a bit more dynamic in that you can add aggregators – implementing a standard interface so adding new aggregator source types in the future would be easy (like Text file and Sql table I already mentioned). Also, the service can run multiple aggregators (of the same or different types) at the same time – each serviced on its own thread (I just love threading but yeh, you have to be careful!). As with QuickMon each instance (or host as I termed it here) can have its own separate config.

So the end result of this little experiment is a working (or should I say workable) example that can already (with some electronic duck tape) be used with QuickMon alerts.

Basic architecture overview

• MailAggregatorService

The main component of this little project is again a simple ‘Windows Service’. The service on its own is actually very simple – really just a shell that contains the aggregator hosts which calls the aggregator  libraries. A host instance gets created for every config entry (in an array) as specified in the config file.

This service also contains my code for self registration (to install it with the -install command line)

• MailAggregatorHost

The MailAggregatorHost (class) is the container that holds the ‘aggregator source type library’. Because each source type implements a standard interface the host does not know or care which specific aggregator it is dealing with. The host is the entity that runs in a permanent loop calling the GetMessages() method of the aggregator, sends the smtp messages and then waits until the next iteration.

• IMailAggregatorSource

Each mail aggregator source library implements the IMailAggregatorSource interface for a particular resource type a.k.a. like Text files, Sql table or whatever. The interface itself is fairly simple and has the following members:

• event AggregatorError
• string GetConfigIdentifierType() – will be use later to dynamically load source types
• bool SetConfig(string config) – configure the source type with specified config
• List<MailAggregatedMessage> GetMessages() – get the messages dub…
• string LastError { get;set;} – not used yet but one day….
• MailAggregatedMessage

Example source code

If you like to play with the source code yourself you need VS2010 – it requires .Net 4 (client framework)

MailAggregator