Yep, ping simply means sending an ICMP packet to the remote server, and
every machine implementing TCP/IP supports ICMP. These are often
blocked by firewalls, and anyway won't tell you if the web server (I
assume that's what you're monitoring) is running on the server.
As Chad says, a web server responds to events, so a service is really
the way to go. There's no reason the service can't use the web server
to send emails though, and a web app could communicate with the service
to provide web based reporting, although it might be easier having the
service log to a database and feed the web app from there. That will
give you some sort of historic data that may be useful.
Rather than check for a specific file on the server, it might be easier
just to try and establish an http connection. If that works you should
be ok.
Finally when you say the customer wants "an internet-side solution" do
you mean they want it to run out in the wild on an internet side web
server? It depends on how much access you have to the internet server,
but if it has SQL server on it, you can use sql agent running a job on
a schedule that could query a web page on your website which will then
check the other web servers (looking for the least invasive options).
Chad Burggraf wrote:
Thom Little wrote:
The customer was envisioning an Internet-side solution and I am wondering if
it is possible.
There is also a question of weather to use Ping or to use the "try to load a
tiny gif image" approach to determine if the servers external to the one
running the program are operational. Apparently not all servers support
Ping?
Does the customer care about a Web-based solution because of how it's
managed or for some other reason? I would assume that you would log the
status of your service (if implemented as a service) somewhere (i.e. a
database or on the file system), so having a Web application interact
with that would be a good solution. You could also of course use a Web
application to perform on-demand status updates or to turn off the
service or whatever.
As far as ping goes, it would be fine for an intranet where you have
control over your servers. In the wild though you'd have to do some
other sort of test. If you have POP or Web servers running on the remote
machines you could do a simple response-based test. It all depends on
your situation.
Cheers
Chad
