TECHNICAL OVERVIEW

Custodian was developed as a service to continually monitor a number of servers for a variety of performance metrics. The software was developed as two components: one for configuration and the other to monitor the servers.

The monitoring component of the service is programmed in Visual C++. In order to poll the servers for the required resource metrics, the service calls a Dynamic Link Library (DLL) programmed in Visual Basic. The DLL utilises Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) to retrieve the data from the servers.

The service uses the CSockets class from the Microsoft Foundation Class (MFC) to implement email and SMS messaging.

To allow the users to configure the software, a web interface has been developed using Active Server Pages (ASP) in conjuction with Visual Basic Scripting. JavaScript was used for validation purposes. The configuration data is stored in an SQL 2000 database with the ability to convert to an Access database.