It’s been a while since my last post but there wasn’t really much to blog about Royal TS 2.0. I’m making progress, just not with the pace I imagined. The last couple of weeks I tried to wrap my head around the “Details” view – essentially the right-explorer-pane. In it’s current implementation, Royal TS shows you the list of connections from a folder or the document. If a connection is selected in the tree, you see the “Dashboard” in the details view. Basically the behavior will remain unchanged. There will be dashboards for connections, tasks, credentials and there will be a details view for folders or documents.

Here’s how the details will look like in Version 2 (this isn’t really the final design, I guess the one or the other detail might change until 2.0 is released):

Let me explain the screen above to you: As you can see, Royal TS will finally have tabs. The “Details” tab is kind of a special tab which will be activated as soon as you click on an inactive connection item to show you it’s dashboard or if you click on a folder/document to show you the details view (content of the folder).

Now, as the picture above suggests, the details view has lot’s of end user capabilities which might be handy for your organizational tasks:

• Group by one or multiple columns (feature is well know for Outlook users)
• Sort columns/groups
• Customize columns (show/hide) and reorder columns
• Find as you type
• Column filters and quick column filters you may know from Excel
• Build complex filters using a filter editor (see screenshot)
• Filter across all columns (similar to the filter functionality in Royal TS 1.6.x)
• Quickly filter out Active or Inactive connections
• Auto Best Fit / Best Fit adjusts the column width to best fit the contents
• Optionally keep all filter settings when you change the selection in the tree (by default, all filters are cleared when you change the selection)
• Optionally show items from all subfolders as well

This piece is still not ready and I think I need another day or two to get it done. That’s it for now. If you have feedback, don’t hesitate…

I was asked recently to post an article on how we do web page monitoring. For a number of reasons we do not really use the built-in “Web Application” monitoring template. One of the reasons is that we are not really happy with the selection of the watcher nodes. We needed a way to monitor every web server in our farms without managing the watcher nodes manually all the time. We create host entries on our web servers pointing to themselves. So every time you browse to www.code4ward.net on one of the web servers you do not go through the load balancer. Since the host entry for www.code4ward.net points to the web server itself, you will browse to the web hosted on the server you are currently connected to.

So I created a small script which is basically doing web monitoring the way we wanted it to be. In this blog post I will talk about the implementation we started to use back in MOM 2005 and still use it (slightly modified) in our SCOM 2007 environments. We have recently migrated all those scripts to PowerShell and did our own class definitions using the authoring console. For now, I will focus on the much simpler implementation using VBScript and OpsConsole without any work in the Authoring Console. Download the vbscript from the following link:

http://www.code4ward.net/c4w/files/Misc/code4ward.Sample.WebContentCheck.zip

Before you begin you should create a group containing all your computers you want to monitor with a web page. Or you can of course also use the script like the Web Application template to monitor a web page through a load balancer or whatever using watcher nodes. In any case, create a computer group with your web servers/watcher nodes.

	In your Operations Manager console switch to the “Authoring Space”, expand “Management Pack Objects”, right-click on the “Monitors” node, select Create a Monitor –> Unit Monitor Now select “Scripting / Generic / Timed Script Two State Monitor” Select a destination management pack. Attention: The group I talked about earlier needs to be in the same management pack with the script monitor we now create. Or the group is in a sealed management pack, then you can select a different destination management pack. Click next.
	Provide a name for your monitor and select a target like “Windows Server”. Notice that we uncheck the checkbox “Monitor is enabled”. We will later create an override to enable the monitor for all the web servers/watcher nodes we created the group earlier.
	Configure a schedule. In general we schedule all our monitors (or rule) to run every 5 minutes (of course there are exceptions).
	I strongly suggest to provide a meaningful script file name on this page, as it will help you to find it on the agent when you have to trouble shoot something. Let’s setup the timeout to 5 minutes. Open the script attached to this blog post and copy everything from the code4ward.Sample.WebContentCheck.vbs into the script text field. The script is very generic and needs 3 parameters to run successfully.  As you can see from the script body, Parameter 1: is the URL of the web page you want to monitor Parameter 2: is the expected text in the content Parameter 3: is the timeout in seconds (-1 means no timeout) Before we click on next, click on the Parameters button to specify your parameters.
	To be on the safe side, I always put the parameters in double-quotes. The parameters line reads: ”http://www.code4ward.net” “code4ward” “30” The configuration means, download the web page from www.code4ward.net every 5 minutes (the scheduled we configured earlier), look for the string “code4ward” (without the quotes) in the content, abort request after 30 seconds if there’s no answer from the web server. If “code4ward” is in the content and the web page was returned within 30 seconds, the monitor is healthy. If “code4ward” is not in the content or the web page took longer than 30 seconds, the monitor is unhealthy.
	Now we need to hook up the property bag status messages from the script with the health monitor’s unhealthy state: Property[@Name=’Status’] Equals Error
	Now we need to hook up the property bag status messages from the script with the health monitor’s healthy state: Property[@Name=’Status’] Equals OK
	Here you can decide, if you want the health state to be warning or critical.
	The last page of the wizard let’s you configure the alert properties for this monitor. In order to get all the nice output from the monitor in the alert description, you need to copy “$Data/Context/Property[@Name='Message']$” (without the quotes") into the alert description field. Now click on “Create” and your monitor is ready to use. All you need to do now, is to create an enable-override on the monitor for the group we created before.

As you can see, the monitor itself is pretty simple and has not all the features you know from the Web Application template. But sometimes less is more and this script monitor is used to monitor hundreds of sites without any problems.

If you have any questions or feedback, just comment or drop me an email.

cheers,
Stefan
http://www.code4ward.net

Today we had a short downtime of our web site because a long overdue update to the latest and greatest DotNetNuke version was installed.

Site performance seems to be significantly better and I hope that the main issues in the forum (broken posts) are now history.

I’m almost done implementing the new “Properties” panel in Royal TS 2.0. The content and functionality is basically the same as in the current version except that it will be available for all types of objects (RDP Connections, Folders, Credentials, ...).

As you can see from the screenshot, the little hint-bar on top of the panel mentions that you can easily pick up a value into the clipboard by double-clicking a row. You can also right click a row to bring up the context menu.

For security reasons, passwords will not be shown in clear text instead an indicator showing that a password is defined is presented to you. But double clicking the “Password” row (or selecting Copy to Clipboard) will actually copy the password into the clipboard. So, Royal TS will also become a very versatile password manager allowing you to organize passwords of all kinds – not only for your connections.

In the context menu, you’ll notice an “Execute” command. This command will only be available in the “Custom Fields” section. In case you store some URL or command line, you can quickly start the command using the Execute menu item.

The Edit command will bring up the usual “Edit->Properties” dialog for the item.

The Properties panel itself, can be “Docked” (always in sight, as seen screenshot), changed to “Auto Hide” (will only slide in when you hover with the mouse over the “Properties” header),  changed to “Float” (panel will show up in a small window, detached from the main window) or even closed (not visible at all). I will post some more details about the docking framework in a couple of weeks but if you are familiar with the Visual Studio docking framework, you’ll get the idea…

Let me know what you think. Any feedback is very much appreciated. If you miss some functionality in this area or have some improvement suggestions, please let me know; now would be a good time ;-)