In the past couple of weeks I’ve been busy part time working on this little project to build a simple monitoring system for myself. At the moment the basic ‘bits’ are all there working reasonably well I might add. On the one side I’ve been contemplating putting the project up on CodePlex like many of my other pet projects but this one has some potential to ‘grow’ into something that could generate some thing more (like income or so…) The trouble with that idea is it may be even more powerful if ‘others’ can extend it but then the main source is available to all. Also, this little tool is not in the same league as proper enterprise monitoring tools like Microsoft SCOM and so on.
Anyway, as far as progress goes, the ‘tool’ or set of tools now can do the following (all tested and working)
- Main shared components for editing, management and configuration of agents plus both a Windows UI and Windows service for hosting the agents (monitor pack).
- Collector agents for
(General)
Disk space – local drive space available
File count and size – file/directory size
Performance counters – monitor performance counters
Ping – ping machines
Windows service state – are specified services running or not
WMI query – specify some WMI query and compare the return value
(Specialized)
BizTalk ports and orchestrations – check if ports/orchestrations are running
BizTalk suspended count – check the suspended instance count
SQL server database size – check database size
SQL server table size – check row count
Httpping – like ping but for http - Notifier agents for:
Log file – a simple text log file
RSS feed – actually really just an xml file that you can host on a web server that is exposed as an RSS feed
SMTP – Sending out alerts as emails
SQL database – storing alert details in a sql server - A special type of ‘Collector’ that is just a folder to contain others (so you can enable/disable all or set a service window for that branch)
- Collector agents support the following general properties and methods:
Enabled
Check dependent collectors even after warning
Repeat alert after x minutes
Only alert once in x minutes
Service windows (yes, even multiple service windows e.g. 5:00 to 12:00 and 13:00 to 17:00 etc.)
Launch a detail view window - Notifier agents support the following properties:
Enabled
Alert level (Info, Warning, Error)
Detail level (Detail, Summary or both)
List of collectors to ‘service’ (default = all)
If implemented – launch a viewer for the notifier
Development
I’m using the .Net 4 client profile framework so download footprint should be fairly small – and I’d like to keep it that way. It is developed using C# and is extendable because of the add-in type of architecture. To add an agent is as simple as implementing a provided interface.
Download example
Soon I’ll add a download link for (the current) test version. It is already fully working as is but I’m continuing to enhance and add things.
Download a first test version here.
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