testing a service activity

[Tom McGlynn]

The Web site Ray mentions is supplemented by another that gives results 
for any VO service.
It's described at 
http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/vo/monitor/get_status_help.html.  It uses
the results of the same tests that are used for the monitor display.

As Ray mentioned we don't check every service, but we try to check 
representative samples
of services from each data provider.  You can check any service based 
upon its IVO identifier
as, e.g.,
    
http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/vo/monitor/get_status.pl?id=ivo://CDS/simbad
and the site  will respond:

 We have checked that service explicitly, here's its status
 We've checked similar services, here is their status
 We don't know anything about this service.

If you find the last, we'd be interested in adding the service to the 
list we check.  Since we're trying
to do these checks reasonably often (~ hourly) we don't want to have to 
check all 500 HEASARC
services (or 10,000 Vizier ones) each time, but the intent is to check 
examples from all data providers.

We recognize that this a bit of a stopgap -- the underlying protocols 
should provide this mechanism,
but as yet they do not.

    Regards,
    Tom McGlynn

Ray Plante wrote:
> Hi Nicholas,
>
> On Thu, 28 Feb 2008, nicolas wrote:
>> Is there a simple a simple way to know if a service is currently 
>> active or not ?
>> If there is not, could it be possible for each service to implement 
>> for example a "isActive" method returning a simple value that would 
>> immediateley identify its state ?
>
> The NVO project has a monitoring service that is configured to watch 
> specific services (at 
> http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/vo/monitor/monitor.pl?services_and_status=list), 
>
> so it's not quite as general as you want.  However, perhaps Michael 
> could comment on the the underlying software that might be helpful.
>
> cheers,
> Ray
>