THE TEAM

• Project Manager - David Parums
  

THE CLIENT

• Department Of Education

AIM

The aim of our project is to develop software for the Department of Education (DoE) which will monitor their servers for key events. Currently the Department of Education has 90 Windows 2000 Servers, as well as there being over 220 schools each with 2 or 3 servers. These servers are running either Windows 2000 or NT4. There are many commercial monitoring software packages available but they are expensive, also many of these packages do many more things than the Department actually needs.

MONITORING

The Custodian project will be developed so as DoE staff members will be able to remotely access the details of events that have occurred. The application will need to monitor a combination of events in the area of performance metrics and event log entries and services. Some examples of the types of things that will be monitored are:

• Disk Space Usage Percentage.
• CPU Usage Percentage.
• Physical Memory Free Percentage.
• Virtual Memory Free Percentage.
• Committed Memory Percentage.
• Processor Interupt Time Percentage.
• Processor Interupts per Second.
• Free Paging Space.
• Number of Pages Read/Written.
• Disk Queue
• Failed Login Attempts.
• Event Logs.
• Failed Automated Services.
• Current Network Bandwidth
• Network Bandwidth - Bytes Recieved.
• Network Bandwidth - Bytes Sent.

ALERTING

When any of the above mentioned events occurs the software is required to send alerts to specified recipients, if the event requires it. These alerts are to be in the form of e-mails, SMS messages and a posting on the web page.

ACCESS

Staff members of the DoE will be able to access the data remotely via a web page; this page will be the main GUI of the program. The web page will display the data for a particular monitored event, as well as an area for staff to specify the current state of the alert ie. ‘Dealt With’ and ‘Dealing With’, and will link to individual pages which will contain more detail on the monitored events, including details such as the last alert and the server which issued the alert.

DEVELOPMENT

The software will be developed as a service written in C++, this service will then call a DLL (Dynamic Link Library) application programmed in Visual Basic. The Visual Basic DLL will utilise WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) to retrieve the data from the polled servers. All data pertaining to the monitored events, the alert recipients contact information and the programs user set parameters will be stored in a SQL2000 database.
When any of the above mentioned events occurs the software is required to send alerts to specified recipients, if the event requires it. These alerts are to be in the form of e-mails, SMS messages and a posting on the web page.

CALENDER