Hi Darragh: A couple thoughts, in addition to sending an email, sending out a text message or perhaps a push notification to mobile devices may be an option. I’m not sure how you’re developing the app and each service (Google, Apple, MS) have their own hooks into push notifications, so that may not be possible. The other thing to perhaps consider adding, as a remediation action to pretty much any of these issues, perhaps allowing the user to invoke a set Powershell script when an alarm is triggered, that would provide for some flexibility, sometimes there’s a specific way to start a service or such, and that lets the user say to run powershell script X when the situation hits. I guess my final question would be what is your goal in developing this tool? There’s several other applications out there that do this and much more, obviously SCOM being the 800 LB gorilla, but Nagios, EG, Whatsup and several others do this, you could also probably just write Powershell scripts to do much of it using background tasks and such. So what do you want to bring to the table? Ryan
On Nov 23, 2015, at 1:30 PM, Darragh Ó Héiligh <d@digitaldarragh.com> wrote:
I'm writing an application at the moment. It started as a thing that I really needed but it's evolving into something a bit more generic.
I'm looking for suggestions on useful ways that it could be developed further to make it useful.
It's primary purpose is as a monitoring tool. It isn't meant as a data analytics utility.
It's current functions are:
1. Restart services. These services can either be given fully in the application config or a number of service prifixes can be used. For example: If I want to restart all report services on an application server and I know these services start with the letters RPT I can restart them with a minimum of configuration.
2. Check services. If a service is set to start up automatically but it's currently stopped, alarm bells should wring. The application Emails an address or list of addresses in the application config when services are not started. The SMTP host, sender address and port are also configurable. This check can also be configured to start any services that are not running but should be.
3. Delete temp files from specific directories. Again, specifically useful for application servers. Let's say you have a folder called SBS with dozens of temp sub folders with files ending in .xml, .pdf, .csv, .cab etc. This will go and delete everything in there ending with these extensions. Of course, these extensions are configurable in... You've guessed it, the application config. However, let's say you have a sub folder within your temp folder called DoNotTouch or Services or something like that. An exclusion or list of exclusions can be added to the application.config so that these folders won't be touched.
4. Log archiving. There are applications that handle log role overs really well but there are also applications that just write to the one log file for years. This becomes impossible to open never mind read! Using the application config you can specify the base folder that these are found in then a name or partial name so that the application will recursively look through and move all of these log files to an archive location. This location is set in the application config but it's also dated and in a folder corresponding to the server name that the application is run on to allow for use on multiple servers connecting to the one NAS for example.
5. Check utilization. Again, this is configurable. Set the threshold of percent free space or percent RAM or CPU available using the application config and the application will Email you and write to the event log when this threshold is reached.
6. Of course there's also a debug mode that will show you what it will do with each function without actually performing any action. There's also a help list so you can check the available options right from the command line.
What else would you like?
I'll make it freely available.
Darragh _______________________________________________ Blind-sysadmins mailing list Blind-sysadmins@lists.hodgsonfamily.org https://lists.hodgsonfamily.org/listinfo/blind-sysadmins