Can you alert on content in an Excel file?

hsearlejones

Hi,

I'm fairly new to Solarwinds but have been setting up some alerts. A colleague wants to be alerted when the content of an excel report changes on one server. There are scripts that run and write to the file to report on whether they completed. I would need to:

1. check for the existence of a process (just a string value)

2. check the status column for the string

3. If the status does not have the value completed, send an alert.

I'm not sure if Solarwinds can read the contents of a file or how to set this up if it can.

Thanks,

Helen.

HolyGuacamole

hi Helen,

You may want to move this discussion to the Server & Application Monitor forum as it is the right product for the job. There are out of the box templates for reading text files and searching for keywords of your choice, but not for reading Excel files.So, you will need to look at the Script Monitors section of the documentation (administrator guide) first to accomplish the job

For the 3 items you have listed

1. This is a browse and select process (no pun intended) from the SAM component monitor wizard

2. Pick your favorite scripting language (I know Perl has some modules to read from excel files but it may be possible in other scripting languages also) and come up with a script that is as per the guidelines for SAM Script Monitors. Essentially your script needs to return a number (sort of result code) that will indicate whether the value is updated or not. If not updated, set the threshold so that it will turn the component into a critical status

3. This is easy. Simply use one of the out of the box alert - alert me when an application/component is in a down/warning or critical status