Service Monitor

The SiteScope Service Monitor checks to see if a service (NT environment) or a specific process is running. There are many services or processes that play an important role in the proper functioning of your server, including Web server, Mail, FTP, News, Gopher, and Telnet. Web environments which support e-commerce transactions may have other important processes that support data exchange.

Each time the Service Monitor runs, it returns a reading and a status message and writes them in the monitoring log file.

Usage Guidelines

The Service Monitor verifies that specific processes are listed as running, and optionally, it can also check to see how much CPU a process is using. If a process that should be running does not show up or if it is using too much memory, SiteScope can either alert you to the problem so that you can address it yourself, or it can run a script to automatically restart the process to help minimize impact on other operations and downtime.

What to monitor

You should create a service monitor for any service or process that should be running on a consistent basis. You can also create a script alert that will restart the service automatically if the service monitor in SiteScope can not find it. The restartService.bat script, located in the <SiteScope install path>/SiteScope/scripts directory, is an easily modifiable template which you can use to create a script for SiteScope to execute in the event your monitor fails.

About scheduling this monitor

The Service Monitor does not put a heavy load on your server. For monitoring remote UNIX servers, SiteScope will usually need to open a telnet or SSH connection to the remote server. While the monitor actions generally do not load the either server, managing a large number of remote connections can results in some performance problems. You will probably want to monitor critical services and services that have a history of problems every five minutes or so. Less critical services and processes should be monitored less frequently.

Status

The reading is the current value of the monitor. For this monitor, the possible readings are:

Running
Not found

The status is logged as either OK or error. An error status is returned if the service is not found.

Completing the Service Monitor Form

To display the Service Monitor Form, either click the Edit link for an existing Service Monitor in a monitor table, or click the add a Monitor link on a group's detail page and click the Add Service Monitor link.

Complete the items on the Service Monitor Form as follows. When the required items are complete, click the Add Service Monitor button.

Server: Choose the server that you want to monitor. The default is to monitor services on the server on which SiteScope is installed. Click the choose server link to monitor services or processses on another server (may require that you define connections to other servers).
Service: Select the service (or process in UNIX) that you want to monitor from the drop-down list. To monitor a service other than those listed then select "Other" in the drop-down list and enter the name of the service in the text box to the right. To monitor an NT process, select "(Using Process Name)" in the drop-down list and enter the name of the Process Name text box under the Advanced Options section.
Update every: Select how often the monitor should check for this service. The default interval is to run or update the monitor once every 10 minutes. Use the drop-down list to the right of the text box to specify another update interval in increments of seconds, minutes, hours, or days. The update interval must be 15 seconds or longer.
Title: Enter a title text for this monitor. This text is displayed in the group detail page, in report titles, and other places in the SiteScope interface. If you do not enter a title text, SiteScope will create a title based on the host, server, or URL being monitored.

Advanced Options

The Advanced Options section presents a number of ways to customize monitor behavior and display. Use this section to customize error and warning thresholds, disable the monitor, set monitor-to-monitor dependencies, customize display options, and enter other monitor specific settings required for special infrastructure environments. The options for this monitor type are described below. Complete the entries as needed and click the Add or Update button to save the settings.

Disable

Check this box to temporarily disable this monitor and any associated alerts. To enable the monitor again, clear the box.

Process Name (NT Only)

If you want to get information about the percentage of CPU being used by a specific process and/or the number of a specific type of process running, enter the name of the process here. SiteScope is looking for the name of the process as it appears in NT Task Manager (example: explorer.exe).

Measure Process Memory Use (UNIX Only)

Check this box if you want SiteScope to report the amount of virtual memory being used by a specific process.

Verify Error

Check this box if you want SiteScope to automatically run this monitor again if it detects an error. When an error is detected, the monitor will immediately be scheduled to run again once.

Note: In order to change the run frequency of this monitor when an error is detected, use the Update every (on errors) option below.

Note: The status returned by the Verify Error run of the monitor will replace the status of the originally scheduled run that detected an error. This may cause the loss of important performance data if the data from the verify run is different than the initial error status.

Warning: Use of this option across many monitor instances may result in significant monitoring delays in the case that multiple monitors are rescheduled to verify errors at the same time.

Update Every (on error)

You use this option to set a new monitoring interval for monitors that have registered an error condition. For example, you may want SiteScope to monitor this item every 10 minutes normally, but as often as every 2 minutes if an error has been detected. Note that this increased scheduling will also affect the number of alerts generated by this monitor.

Schedule

By default, SiteScope monitors are enabled every day of the week. You may, however, schedule your monitors to run only on certain days or on a fixed schedule. Click the Edit schedule link to create or edit a monitor schedule. For more information about working with monitor schedules, see the section on Schedule Preferences for Monitoring.

Monitor Description

Enter additional information about this monitor. The Monitor Description can include HTML tags such as the <BR> <HR>, and <B> tags to control display format and style. The description will appear on the Monitor Detail page.

Report Description

Enter an optional description for this monitor that will make it easier to understand what the monitor does. For example, network traffic or main server response time. This description will be displayed on with each bar chart and graph in Management Reports and appended to the tool-tip displayed when you pass the mouse cursor over the status icon for this monitor on the monitor detail page.

Depends On

To make the running of this monitor dependent on the status of another monitor or monitor group, use the drop-down list to select the monitor on which this monitor is dependent. Select None to remove any dependency.

Depends Condition

If you choose to make the running of this monitor dependent on the status of another monitor, select the status condition that the other monitor or monitor group should have in order for the current monitor to run normally. The current monitor will be run normally as long as the monitor on which it depends reports the condition selected in this option.

List Order

By default, new monitors are listed last on the Monitor Detail page. You may use this drop-down list to choose a different placement for this monitor.

Error if

Set the Error threshold for this monitor. By default SiteScope reports an error condition if it does not find at least one of the named processes running. If you want to change this to report an error if multiple processes are not found, or if the percentage of CPU used by the process exceeds a certain percentage number, or if the process memory size exceeds a certain number of bytes, you can do so here.

For example, if you want SiteScope to report an error if it does not find 3 HTTP processes running, chose the processes option in the drop-down box, != (not equal to) as the comparison operator, and type 3 in the text box.

Warning if

Set the Warning threshold for this monitor. SiteScope does not have a default warning threshold for this monitor. If you want to define a warning threshold, you may do so here.

For example, if you want SiteScope to report a warning if the specified process starts using too much memory, select the memory option in the drop-down box, and >= as the comparison operator, and type the memory threshold, in bytes, in the text box.

Good if

SiteScope reports a good status if it detects the named process running. You can change this to be dependent upon multiple processes running, the percentage of CPU used by the process, or the status returned by the process.