monitoring remote applications, how?

[RD]

I have a number of applications written bothe in vb.net and vb6 tat are
running unattended 24-7 on sveral different machines on a lan at a client
site.

The problem is that sometimes one of these apps stops working for various
reasons and it usually takes quite a bit of time for the admins to realize
it, usually a customer calls in and says hey your app is not working (most
of these are automated telephony order entry systems, some are automated FTP
transfer apps, etc..)

It would be helpfull if we could implement some way to monitor the state of
these various apps from another computer and if the apps could send a
warning flag to the centalized server whenever something went awry in their
execution or if the server could detect anomalies in the execution of these
apps.

Any help or suggestions on how this could be done would be most welcome,
Ideally we would like it best if we did not have to modify qany code in the
apps we're surveiling.

Thanks,

Bob

 

[James D. Marshall]

Just up my alley...<insert laugh>

Several ways to accomplish this
Use a system management tool from BMC (Patrol), CA (Unicenter), IBM
(Tivoli), Microsoft (MOM), HP Openview.
These tools are designed to do what you are requesting, with a catch
($$$$$) - add a couple for dollar signs for good measure.
There are some smaller products, one which I have used from DeepMetrix
called ipMonitor only about ($$)

If you haven't caught on this is a lot of what I do, use system management
tools, then write my own stuff to fill in the sometimes gaping holes they
leave.

Now that being said, you can use .NET to monitor processes and Services and
performace counters, you will need to set up a timer function to go out and
re-query the system(s) you are interested in. If the apps are installed as a
service, also monitor the spawned process(s), I have seen services merrily
state they are running just fine, whilst the spawned process dies. This
could be set with email notification, will need access to a POP server.
Also, be careful with putting anything on a network appliance server or
voice response server, they do not tend to play well, due to the OS is a
verliy scaled down (just enough to get it up)

The big catch to any of this is remote accessability to the servers in
question, and will the customer allow you to perform remote monitoring for
your apps, and watch out, they may try to get ou to monitor their stuff also
at cost to you.

 

[chris.biber]

Bob,

Another way to accomplish this is to use a telephony toolkit such as
VBVoice. You can easily create a monitoring application which calls
your telephony apps at specified intervals and alerts the administrator
via phone or pager or any other means. VBVoice, as the name implies is
a rapid application development tool that resides directly inside
Microsoft Visual Studio .NET

For more on this topic, visit our web site www.pronexus.com or read
about 'Watchdog' at
http://www.pronexus.com/products/case-studies/watchdog.htm

Regards,

Chris Biber
Pronexus