Monitoring
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at UWE
UWE IT Services has bought into a few commercial solutions for monitoring systems such as BMC software. However, the myUWE (uPortal) team still primarily checks the health of our systems using home-grown scripts. Despite this basic approach, our team is usually the first to spot when Eddie's in the space time continuum...
Heartbeat Monitoring
At UWE, we use a single PC in the corner of the office with a wall-mounted monitor which we use to monitor our systems' heartbeat various urls - this runs a scheduled task every 10 minutes which calls a wsh script written in vbs. The script makes HTTP GET or POST (in cases where basic auth credentials are required) requests to several urls, waits for responses within 30 seconds, and checks for a specific string in each response.
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In addition, emails and SMS messages are triggered by changes of state (OK becoming UX etc).