A simple ping can tell you whether a remote computer is running and reachable, but this often does not provide you with enough information about the computer.
Just because the computer is "alive", for example, doesn't mean that the Web server software is running properly.
adTempus provides additional monitoring flexibility through its ability to make an HTTP request to a remote computer, and then evaluate the response that the computer returns.
In a simple situation, you may only want to verify that Internet Information Server is running and serving pages properly. To do this, you would create a simple ASP page on the Web server, called, for example, "testapp.asp". It might look like this:
<%@ Language=VBScript%> Application Status: OK
You would then configure the Computer Monitor to request this page, and to trigger if the response did not match "Application Status: OK".
Note that we did not format the output from this ASP page as a properly-formed HTML page. Since it's not intended for a browser, there's no need to do this. In fact, the HTML tags would make the error message harder to read if you include it in notification messages.
The ASP page or other scripted page you have adTempus request can do as much processing as you need and then return an appropriate response. For example, it could verify that your web server is able to connect to your web server, check that disk space is sufficient, etc.
The computer monitor sets two Script Parameters that you can use when assessing the state of the target computer.
The ConnectionStatusCode parameter indicates whether adTempus actually received a response from the computer.
If the ConnectionStatusCode is 0, adTempus was able to retrieve the requested page, and the ResponseText parameter contains the complete text returned by the server.
If the ConnectionStatusCode is not 0, this indicates a network or server error that prevented adTempus from receiving a reply. For example, the target computer may be unreachable due to a network problem. In this case, the ResponseText parameter contains an error message describing the problem. A list of status codes is available here.
Using the ResponseText Script Parameter, you can execute certain steps of your job depending on the nature of the error returned, and include the error message from the server in notification messages that get sent by adTempus.
Sample script for customizing the response to a failure