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Two separate component monitors - unified status?

I'm not sure about the wording of this, so apologies in advance if this is something previously asked. I did search for this but had no luck...

We have a file transfer scripting process on a server that we want to monitor. There is a custom EXE that reads a config file and at certain specified times, wakes up, starts an FTP transfer, writes some log files etc. then sleeps until the next specified transfer time.

This custom EXE does not show up in the process list for some reason, so we can't just add a simple process monitor for that. Looking at the process list, either the FTP program is active (when a transfer is taking place) or SLEEP.EXE is running. Either one, not both.

If I create separate component monitors to track either executable then one will be down when the other is up. In either case, there will be a red circle on the node showing this. Is there a way to create a component/application monitor that shows green when either of two things are up and not show red when either is down?

I know the real longterm solution is to either rewrite the custom EXE for better behavior, or otherwise re-engineer the process, etc. That's in the works but we need a solution short-term.

Thanks in advance!

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Accepted answers

mrxinu

ryan.davis26 is spot on if you want to keep your existing components and just alert when the special "this or that is fine, but both missing is bad" situation. If on the other hand you want to merge the two components so that it actually checks for both processes and returns the number of matches such that 0 matches would mean there's nothing you could do a custom script PowerShell script monitor:

# an array of process names to search for (case-sensitive)$processesToSearchFor = @(';slack', 'VeraCrypt')# get the number of matching processes$numProcs = (Get-Process | ?{ $_.Name -cin $processesToSearchFor }).Countif ($numProcs -gt 0) {    Write-Output "Message: Process matches found."    Write-Output "Statistic: $numProcs"    Exit 0}else {    Write-Output "Message: No process matches found."    Write-Output "Statistic: $numProcs"    Exit 1}

Make sure you run Get-Process on the system in question and check out the Name column to find out what the process is being called in the list (it likely won't have the EXE suffix). Also, make sure you're running it in remote mode so that the script is being executed on the target system. There is some footwork involved to give SolarWinds permission to do this so definitely check out this document from SolarWinds on using PowerShell in SAM.

http://www.solarwinds.com/documentation/apm/docs/Configuring_and_Integrating_PowerShell.pdf

All comments

ryan.davis26

I believe you may be able to achieve this sort of 'custom' status for the node using advanced alerts. But you'd have to manually reset it after the condition is no longer true.

mrxinu

# an array of process names to search for (case-sensitive)$processesToSearchFor = @(';slack', 'VeraCrypt')# get the number of matching processes$numProcs = (Get-Process | ?{ $_.Name -cin $processesToSearchFor }).Countif ($numProcs -gt 0) {    Write-Output "Message: Process matches found."    Write-Output "Statistic: $numProcs"    Exit 0}else {    Write-Output "Message: No process matches found."    Write-Output "Statistic: $numProcs"    Exit 1}

http://www.solarwinds.com/documentation/apm/docs/Configuring_and_Integrating_PowerShell.pdf

HolyGuacamole

The script above is an excellent option. You can install an agent on this server and assign this template to avoid "footwork" of winrm, remote execution pre-reqs

Another workaround is to leave your existing components as-is and create a group with these 2 component monitors. Choose 'best case' for group status calculation. If one of the process is up, the group is up. If both are down, the group will be down. However, this will not affect the application monitor status.

mrxinu

Brilliant x2! *high-five for teamwork!*

esojka

Looks like I have some options to investigate. Thanks everyone!