Automating the job

The next hurdle for our simple Information Radiator is automating and scheduling the job, and, as you'd expect, we can do this very quickly and easily in Jenkins.

Just create a new Jenkins job that fetches the corresponding URL (with /api/xml at the end) and feed this to your XML parsing script to extract the current values.

Many programming and scripting languages have a built-in XML or web fetching abilities, but if you prefer, you can use curl or wget to fetch the data and then pass this to your script.

The Jenkins job can be scheduled to run at a frequency that suits you—you can do this through the inbuilt cron function using the standard cron notation; for example, you can set your job to run every two minutes, as follows:

In this entry, I have specified H/2 * * * * to have this job run every two minutes. The symbol H, is a handy Jenkins inbuilt mechanism that allows Jenkins to balance and manage job scheduling. Rather than trigger all the jobs at exactly the same time...