Announce: VOMon, a VO Monitoring Service

[John Taylor]

Hi all,
I'd like to announce a monitoring application that might be of interest 
to anyone who's responsible for keeping VO services up and running, and 
wants to find out about outages before their users do.

VOMon interrogates an IVOA registry with a sysadmin-supplied xquery, and 
pings the resulting services every so often to generate a html report on 
their statuses.  An example report can be seen here:
http://thor.roe.ac.uk/vomon/status.xml
In this case, the service is monitoring all services with authority Id 
"*roe.ac.uk", ie everything we run here at WFAU in Edinburgh.

Here is another example, monitoring all the publishing registries that 
are in the AstroGrid registry:
http://thor.roe.ac.uk/vomon-reg/status.xml

Currently "pinging" simply means checking that the accessUrl of the 
service returns http code 200.  In some special cases such as cone, siap 
and ssap a trivial query string is appended to the URL.  Once the VOSI 
interfaces are widely deployed I'll make VOMon use these instead.  Out 
of the box, VOMon produces an html report which can be tailored to your 
needs by tweaking the associated xsl.   It also ships with plugins that 
allow you to send notice of outages to you via email or jabber, or log 
them to a file (useful for calculating uptime).

If you want to try it out to monitor your own services you can download 
it from here:
http://vomon.sourceforge.net/

I'd be interested in any feedback you have on configuring it and running it.

Regards, and an early Merry Christmas,

John

Credits:
VOMon is basically a mash-up of the AstroRuntime (used to interrogate 
the registry), and MARS (used to do the actual monitoring).



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AstroGrid/VOTech
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WFAU, Institute for Astronomy, Edinburgh
Skype:johndavidtaylor <skype:johndavidtaylor?chat>

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