User Communication of Outages

[kkmk]

Hi,

I want to inform the users about the outages of TM1 application. How can i automate this outage, and this I want to update to our TM1 webpage? How to write a process to check the outage?

Thanks
KKMK

[jim wood]

I guess you could deploy a file to a directory before closing the service down using a process. If you're good with web code you could pick up the file content and update time / date and deploy it to your site. You could even generate an email from a process. Thinking as I type, I guess you could use a batch file to stop the service and kick of the processes I just mentioned.

[tomok]

Hi,

I want to inform the users about the outages of TM1 application. How can i automate this outage, and this I want to update to our TM1 webpage? How to write a process to check the outage?

Thanks
KKMK

Let's see, you want to notify users when TM1 is down, using TM1 (which by the way is down)?. Do you see the irony?

[jim wood]

Good point sir. The suggestions I made above were based on the assumption that we were talking about planned outages. I guess we could do with further clarification,

Jim.

[George Regateiro]

For unplanned outages we have the following.

A custom service written on the server the does a scheduled check of if the service is running? If yes it tries to login to TM1. If the service is down or the application cannot login to the server then it automates the use of the APP_OFFLINE.htm (google search will get you up to speed on how it works in IIS). This will take the webservers offline (with a published message) and will blast an email to the admins to see if further communication is needed.

For planned downtime's we use the APP_OFFLINE functionality to with parameters to give the users a time frame when accessing TM1Web.

We do not automate emails to the users since we want to control that communication.

[jim wood]

Nice solution George. Are you using another TM1 service for that or are you using a batch script or something of the sort?

[George Regateiro]

The service was written in .NET (with the classic API for the login part). If starting from scratch it may be easier to use the .NET API since it is out of the box more friendly and since all it does is login the limitations of the .NET API don't come into play. You can probably do it through batch scripts as well I just default to .net.

The scheduled downtime uses a custom service that uses the .NET framework file listener class. Our front end creates a file that is picked up by the web servers to take the website offline.

[kkmk]

Thank you all for your valuable suggestions.

We want to communicate when an unplanned outage happened.

Can I get any help on how to write a service in .Net as mentioned by George?

Thanks
KKMK

[David Usherwood]

There are powershell scripts floating around which deliver service status - eg
http://www.computerperformance.co.uk/ezine/ezine147.htm
Shouldn't be hard to customise to report the running status of your TM1 services.

[kkmk]

I got some information from the below link on how to logon to TM1 using the script.

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocente ... 71005.html

But digging more on how I can make this script as service that check TM1 server availability on a certain interval.

Thanks
KKMK