Monitoring API with email alerts where our apps report to

Question

We have around 5 different apps, written in c#, vb6 and asp all of which can make API calls, or webpage calls etc. They are installed on many different locations/computers.

We would like a 3rd SASS hosted system that these apps can report to once per minute, saying “yes we are still running”

We want a dashboard, showing an alive or not status, and maybe even an alert email if one app breaks/stops speaking out to your system, for more then x min.

It sounds a pretty simple system, but the ones I have looked at include far more than this.

Does anyone know of any system like this?

We run on the windows platform and asp.net webspace (installing extra SW on all these computers is not really an option, but a call within our own sw is)

In simple terms

I want all out apps to connect to lets say

http://www.alertfakeaddy.com/reporter.php?appname=xx&location=xx&message=working

http://www.alertfakeaddy.com/reporter.php?appname=xx&location=xx&message=error-point1

http://www.alertfakeaddy.com/reporter.php?appname=xx&location=xx&message=error-point2

or use an api in the same some of manner

once per mine

and an alerter to check these messages, for error or lack of message, and email etc, if that happens

if such a service exists, perhaps £50-70 a month would be what we are looking for

Answer 1

VB6?! Seriously?! :-)

You could use the MQTT protocol, which is great for this sort of thing, and use Node-RED (free) to display browser-based dashboard report.

The SNMP protocol is also designed for reporting the status of (networked) resources. You could search for a good GUI, there seem to be plenty.

Nagios is pretty much industry standard for determining & reporting when network attached devices are not reachable. Perhaps you could rig something to check the port on which your app runs?