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Is it possible to "bump-start" an application monitor with status "Unknown" using SDK?

There are a measurable number of our application monitors that are scheduled every 86400 seconds and whose status becomes "Unknown" if they timeout during their once-a-day poll. When they run again - or if we go into "edit application monitor", select all the components and use the "test" function, all is well, and generally they do not timeout again. However, because the next scheduled poll/run is in 24 hours, they appear on the dashboard with "Unknown" status. Our choices to repair this problem are to either wait 24 hours or bump-start the monitor manually using the "test" functionality. Neither of these is very attractive in terms of our manual resources and the extent of the problem.

So do you think it would be possible to use the SDK to find an instance of an application monitor template whose status is 'Unknown" and then command it to poll/run in real-time? I've used PowerShell and the SDK to extract information similar to this from Orion but I cannot find a module that would provide what amounts to a "poll-now" command.

Any suggestions or hints? Thanks In Advance.

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mrxinu

There's a PollNow verb for the Orion.APM.Application entity that just takes the ID of the application to start it off. Are you familiar with the whole SDK+verb routine?

FormerMember

MrXinu - aha. I am not at all familiar with SDK verbs. I looked for a list of verbs but couldn't find that level of detail. Could I ask for a pointer to the documentation/example/tutorial material on how to use verbs? I'll search for PollNow in the meantime. Thanks for the direction on this.

mrxinu

Ah, well welcome welcome! You said that you'd used the SDK and PowerShell to extract information so you're familiar with the Connect-Swis and Get-SwisData (read) cmdlets at minimum. You also have New-SwisObject (create), Set-SwisObject (update), and Remove-SwisObject (delete). Once you've exhausted what you can do with the CRUD (create, read, update, delete) operations you have to move on to the verbs (essentially functions) to do the rest.

Requesting a fresh poll is one of those verbs.

If you open up SWQL Studio (if you've not used it, it was installed alongside the SDK and behaves a bit like SQL Studio for SWQL queries) there will be a namespace called Metadata. Expand that and there are two entities that tell you what you can and can't do with each of the entities (nodes, interfaces, application monitors, etc.) called Metadata.Entity and Metadata.VerbArgument.

If you double-click on Metadata.Entity and add a WHERE clause that limits to '%APM%' (old name for SAM) you'll see just the entities that you're after. For a generic application monitor I looked at Orion.APM.Application in the FullName column. If you scroll to the right there are five fields we're interested in: CanCreate, CanRead, CanUpdate, CanDelete, and CanInvoke. They have values of false, true, true, false, and true, respectively. So, it's interesting if you want to make adjustments to one, but not interesting for polling. So, moving on.

Double-clicking the Metadata.Verb entity and then searching for the same Orion.APM.Application (this time in the EntityName column) tells me the available verbs are Unmanage, Remanage, CreateApplication (cool, because CanCreate was false above), DeleteApplication (cool, because CanDelete was false above), and PollNow. The last one is the one we're after.

The columns to focus on are EntityName (Orion.APM.Application), VerbName (PollNow), Position, Name, and Type. For PollNow there's a single required bit of information you have to provide the verb and that's the applicationId which is of type System.Int32 (so, a number).

So your script would have to start out by getting the ApplicationID field from the Orion.APM.Application entity (maybe look for application monitors with a recent Created value) and then feed them to the Invoke-SwisVerb cmdlet. Assuming you've connected, queried, and started looping over the values, it would look like this when you actually execute the verb in PowerShell.

Invoke-SwisVerb -SwisConnection $swis -Entity "Orion.APM.Application" -Verb "PollNow" -Arguments @($id)

You're going to get some XML back in the form of a PowerShell object, but you can ignore it. If it fails the entire cmdlet is going to fail so you can handle that with a try/fail block.

Also, the reason for using the array even though there's only a single value in it is that that's what the cmdlet is expecting and most times you do have >1 argument to pass.