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HOW WE WENT IN RELEASE ONE

Release One presented a lot of new challenges both in the process of development, and in technical areas, that after some work the project team handled effectively.The goals set during the initial stages of the project were met and the client seemed satisfied with the outcome. Overall, it was a satisfactory release of the server monitoring software.

RELEASE ONE DESCRIPTION

Release One provides approximately one third of the functionally required for the finished product.

In this release, Custodian monitors servers Memory Usage, CPU Usage, and Hard Disk Space. It does this by polling servers using WMI and comparing the resource values returned with the server's action parameters retrieved from the database. If the action parameters are breached, then the details of the alert are stored within the database for viewing via the web page. Here users can view a list of the previous 30 alerts and their details. They can also select a particular server and view a complete list of alerts relating to that server.

The software allows for server groups to be created and edited, which involves giving the group a name and adding servers to it.

Alert groups can also be created and stored within the database. The details of an alert group consist of lists of alert recipients for e-mail, net send, and SMS.

Rules can be added which allow the user to select a rule type such as hard disk space. To this they can then allocate a parameter such as 'alert when disk space usage is < x %'. This rule is then given a name and stored.

A server group, rule, and alert group can then be combined to make an action. An action has properties such as polling time and 'alert after' time, which are also stored in the database to tell the software how to monitor and alert on that particular rule.

PROBLEMS

So far we have encountered a few little problems along the way. These include:

  • Implementing COM
  • Retrieving values from returned WMI instances
  • Implementing C++ calling a Visual Basic DLL
These problems were dealt with quickly, and are no longer an issue.

OUTSTANDING PROBLEMS

As we come to the end of Release One, there are no current outstanding issues.