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My client is requesting to be notified any time one of their business processes fails for any reason. I had the idea of writing a seperate application that will run as an "observer" and check for various parts of the process.

An example would be that a daily file was generated and uploaded to an FTP location. The "Observer" might have the following "tests" :

  • Connect to the FTP
  • Go to folder where file should exist
  • Find file with naming convention
  • Verify create date of file

Failure of any step will send an alert email and also log to a report (both in case database is down OR email is down).

My question is.... Are there any products out there that do something close to this? I'd rather buy if there is something robust out there. If not, this almost seems like a unit test platform... Anything out there for testing I could potentially repurpose?

As an FYI, we are a Microsoft/Windows based shop.

Thx in advance!

murrekatt
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Shawn Dube
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1 Answers1

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You could even use a Continuous Integration framework for this. They normally monitor source code repositories and build&test things, but could be used for this as well.

For instance, Hudson, Jenkins and CrouseControl.NET are a few open source ones that are good and can easily be set up for something like this. Only change the monitoring of a repository to either filesystem over FTP and write a small script which checks what you need. Everything else comes for free by the framework, i.e. email, web interface for monitoring and running things.

Just an idea.

murrekatt
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