VO service monitoring

[Alasdair Allan]

Rob Seaman wrote:
> Has anybody considered how best to add our VOEvent brokers to this  
> list:
>
> 	http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/vo/monitor
>
> This seems like an excellent way to raise VOEvent's visibility and  
> to enforce some discipline on maintaining our services.  Vanilla  
> TCP's "i am alive" packets are pretty much designed to support such  
> monitoring already - seems like this should be an easy goal to  
> meet.  Would just need a client that speaks vTCP on one side and  
> whatever the monitor wants on the other.

I actually do this as part of my network monitoring already, and  
it'll show up for instance on the eSTAR status map at.

   http://vo.astro.ex.ac.uk/estar/cgi-bin/status.cgi

Oh, one of the telescope webcameras seems to have disappeared behind  
an HTTP basic authentication wall (again), so just hit "cancel" if it  
asks you for password. Got to fix that... *sigh*

You don't even have to talk to the vTCP endpoint (although you can),  
my event broker has a SOAP end point which you can ping. The broker  
then does a self and sanity check, and returns a ACK or a fault code.  
Shouldn't be too hard, AG in the UK do something similar as well, I  
think John Taylor wrote it. I'm presuming there is an IVOA note about  
this somewhere, but I haven't been paying attention.

Al.