ASPWATCHER

ASPWatcher is an IIS Server monitoring system. It is lightweight, scaleable, fast, and it works. ASPWatcher is only a product because every once in a while ASP will quit in IIS. A simple ping server script won't detect the fact that ASP pages are not being served. Data driven websites also seem to fall down sometimes under IIS. ASPWatcher runs best in a "Web Farm" scenario, with one copy running on every web server. Each server requests a special ASP page from his peer server. That page has a test that demostrates that ASP is being served up, as well as an ODBC connection to an empty MS Access database. If a certain text is returned, then all is assumed to be OK. If not then an email is sent to a specified address.

Screen Shot:
ASP Watcher

Join the project at

The latest setup can be found here. It will alway have "setup" in the name

How It Works:
In a web farm, to ensure the best reliability, scaleability, and to avoid a single point of failure, this app is run distributed. For example, if you have a web farm of 25 IIS Servers, you'll setup ASPWatcher on every machine. Then, during the configuration (on first run of the app or service), you will setup the parameters something like:

Machine Name	URL	From Email	To Email	Interval(seconds)	OK Text
webserver1	http://webserver2/aspwatcher.asp	webserver2@domain.com	sysadmin@domain.com	300	allok
webserver2	http://webserver3/aspwatcher.asp	webserver3@domain.com	sysadmin@domain.com	300	allok
...
...
webserver25	http://webserver1/aspwatcher.asp	webserver1@domain.com	sysadmin@domain.com	300	allok

What it all means:

Machine Name	The Server being monitored
URL	The location of ASPWatcher.asp (feel free to rename this file)
From Email	This can be anything, but should tell the IIS Admin WHICH server is not responding. It does NOT have to be a real email alias(and probably shouldn't be).
To Email	The email address that should receive the failure notice. Hint: Get an email-enabled cell phone!
Interval	How often to check the server, in seconds. Must be > 5 sec and < 3600 sec (1 hour).
OKText	ASPWatcher will search for this EXACT string in the results of the HTTP request. If they exist, all is well. Any other response (404, 500, etc) sends email to the ToEmail address.

This way, server1 watches server2, server2 watches server3, etc. Server25 should be setup to watch Server1. No single machine's failure will prevent your servers from being monitored. ASPWatcher sits unobtrusively in the system tray of your IIS web servers. It runs as an NT/WIN2K service, for best reliability. ASPwatcher reports via email when the monitored server fails to respond with the text defined by OK Text. In the ASPWatcher.asp page delivered by setup (in the Application Directory), the string "ALLOK" is returned if the page loads AND the database defined by the system DSN opens ok.

To join the project, or to give comments, feedback, etc.,
Contact Me:
Nik Martin