Do you have any aversion to Microsoft
.Net? I have something along these lines working (kind of), although
it is also kind of a hack. I have the .Net framework, and IIS installed on
the WUG machine, and have created a .Net Web Service with methods that return
various types of information. The way that it works is that I
create custom WUG asp pages, one for each web method, each returning a
specific set of data that I am trying to get at. For instance, I have
a method that pulls the current status of the server: (Total down
devices, total up devices, total devices monitored) It calls the
custom WUG web page, grabs the result, parses it, and returns it. On it's way
out it drops the results into system cache, specifying that it will be
cached for 45 seconds. I also specify a file system hook dependency and
point it at the current weeks event log. In this case the first user runs
the method, and gets the status details back, if another runs the method within
45 seconds and nothing has touched the current WUG event log, they get the
cached version. This way, you always get fresh information, but the
impatient user who sits and hits refresh 50 times in a row does not kill
your WUG's built in web service, instead - as long as nothing has changed,
they get the cached version, and it seems to run really fast. And even if
something does change, the call to WUG's web service is local to
the .Net web service so it runs very fast, and then IIS's much
better web server can take over. Of course you could do away with the
caching altogether and there are still great benefits with this model. The
really cool thing about this hack is that with a .Net web service, I can
return whatever I want, including an entire data set (multiple
recordsets, including links between them) and consume the web service from
any client in any internet capable language.
So I
am also working on a system tray app (vb.net), which will allow our net
admins to click once to pull a list of down devices, status information and
device details. (like for routers we are storing the Circuit ID's and
trouble ticket contact info in the notes for the device). The web methods
for that app will also be doing checks against SQL tables and returning rich
hierarchical recordsets as a dataset, for display in a hierarchical
datagrid. I am even considering adding IIS and .Net to our helpdesk server
and creating a service to allow them to log trouble tickets to that system right
from the systray app.
This
is really cool stuff. It would have been nice if it would have been
possible to reach right into WUG and get what I wanted with API, but doing it
through the web service/custom asp pages works well enough. Maybe they will give
us that in a future version. Or direct integration with .Net?
:-)
I do
not have anything that is "packagable" to give to the list yet, but
if anyone wants, I will post code snippets and help in any way
that I can. What I have done so far is kind of tailored for our
specific needs. Once I have the bugs ironed out, I do plan on releasing
some kind of a generic web service, and a consumer so that people can take it
and modify to suit their needs.
Note
:You have to be willing to Install the .Net CLR (Common Runtime
Language) on any machine where you want to run .Net code. And to do web services
you would need IIS.
Hope
this helps, or at least sparks your imagination...
Jim
Scheitel
Knife
River Corporation
-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Newton Jr. [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Wednesday, November 13, 2002 2:38 PM
To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]'
Subject: [WhatsUp Forum] Programming interface to What's UpHas anyone attempted to connect to What's Up from VB/C/C++? What I would like to do is write an application that will ask What's Up if a host is down. This application could be run on demand to determine if a given device or service was down. Additionally, it would be interesting to get a list of down devices.
I would like to put this data into another application that tests dependencies.
As an example, we have an application that runs at 2AM. It depends on our Oracle server being up. What I want to do is run an application at 1:55 AM and have it ask What's Up if the Orcale server is up. If it is up, I want it to run the application at 2AM. If not, do something else (to be determined.
Has anyone done this time of work? I see that What's Up has an ODBC interface, but I am not sure how to use it.
Thanks.
Richard Newton Jr.
Enterprise Network Engineer
