ASP.NET page to reflect server status

Question

Hi,

I'm looking to create a webpage that will reflect the status of one of my company's servers automatically. Frequently there will be a minor error that only lasts 2-3 minutes, and it would be great to have this reflected on a self-generated page, which might prevent 50-60 unhappy clients from calling in simultaneously and asking what's wrong.

I'm not quite sure where to begin - would anyone have a suggestions for good resources to study? Programming examples? I'm not referring to the basics of writing an ASP.NET page, of course, but rather process interaction in Windows.

Thanks.

Answer 1

To pull this off, you'd need a separate page that essentially runs server diagnostics, otherwise the page wouldn't know if it was up or down. Also, the page would need to be isolated from the sort of problems that are kill other people's requests, such as cache hit problems, memory starvation, high CPU usage, insufficient bandwidth. So ideally the diagnostics would run in a separate app-pool, separate virtual directory, separate machine.

Many of the interesting diagnostics would require a WMI call, but some you can get from the My.Computer namespace.

Answer 2

Also, are you going to do this on every server, or do you want one web server to display the status of several different servers?

It also depends on the type of errors your servers are encountering.

If they are going down completely, or are losing internet connection, then pinging them after an interval of time will let you know if they are up or not.

If you have a specific process running on a server that becomes unavailable, that can be a little more tricky.

Your best bet is to find a way to do a simple request from the services/applications that are important and see if you get a response, if you do, the server is likely up, if not, then it is likely not.

Anything you can do to reduce the number of support calls you get is a good idea, but I'd also focus some time and try to figure out why your servers are going down so often.

Also, telling your users that the server is down, but not giving a reason why may not give the effect you are looking for. Users will still be confused and frustrated when they can't get their work done.

Answer 3

I know you were looking to build a webpage to display the server diagnostics, but there are plenty of server monitoring tools that produce webpages for an easy dashboard view of the history.

A quick google returned the following link:

http://www.webdesignbooth.com/10-really-useful-server-monitoring-tools/