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Monitoring of the web server health can help resolve situations where the web server becomes unresponsive or unavailable by alerting technical personnel about the server status.
Several 3rd party products can be used for monitoring web service health, amongst others: Mercury SiteScope, HP OpenView, Paessler PRTG, Solarwinds IPMonitor, KeyNote, etc.
Using a Basic Page to Monitor Web Server Availability
Alternatively, a basic .aspx page can be used to monitor the availability of the web service. The following script can be saved as an aspx page in the web server root directory. Accessing the file through a monitoring system can monitor the basic health of the IIS server.
<%@ Page Language="C#" %>
<!-- IsAlive.aspx
Check that server is alive
-->
<html>
<body topmargin="0" bgcolor="FFFFFF">
<%
Response.Write("<CENTER><BR>");
Response.Write("<table width=250 bgcolor=green><tr align=center><td><strong><font color=white>Page loaded successfully</font></strong></td></tr>");
Response.Write("</table></CENTER>");
%>
</body>
</html>
Using a Survey to Monitor Survey Engine Availability
Monitoring a dummy survey is a good method of ensuring that your Forsta Plusserver environment is working properly. The approach below will only "cost" one complete transaction, and we avoid the additional work of "flagging" certain projects in the transaction logs. The recommended approach for creating and monitoring a Forsta survey is as follows because it will only generate one complete:
- Create a short survey; one page with some static text should be sufficient. Add some text to the page that is easily recognized by the monitoring software such as "Survey Loaded" or similar.
- Compile the survey as a limited survey, allowing respondents to reenter the survey upon completion.
- Upload one respondent to the survey and find the respondent’s unique link from the Respondent Editor (or send it as an invitation email from Forsta Plus if a respondent was uploaded with an email address.)
- Use the personalized URL to monitor the environment; i.e. http://server/wix/p12345678.wix?r=1&s=XXXXXX
If the ‘EncryptSystemRequestParameters’ configuration setting is enabled, the alternative link can be used. Following the steps above should enable monitoring of Forsta Plus end-to-end, as failures on either the front-end or back-end will fail the survey. For best coverage you should monitor all deployment servers internally, and any load-balanced public IP-addresses externally. You will then be notified in the event of a failure in the network infrastructure, and if there are any problems reaching the servers.