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This article is part of a series:

• Part 1 - Creating Custom Service Monitors in Uptime Infrastructure Monitor
• Part 2 - Creating Custom Service Monitors with Retained Data Collection
• Part 3 - Creating Plugin Service Monitors in Uptime Infrastructure Monitor

Uptime Infrastructure Monitor provides many built in service monitors that allow you to monitor and alert on a wide array of services and applications within your enterprise. However, the standard Uptime Infrastructure Monitor service monitors may not be adequate to monitor all of the systems, applications and proprietary devices in your environment. In some cases, you may want to capture metrics that are unique to your environment. To do this, you can define custom service monitors to monitor custom services and applications to provide the level of in depth performance monitoring that you require. Using custom service monitors, you can monitor and graph historical performance data from just about any device in your environment.

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Windows agents do not require a password file. However, you must enter the equivalent settings into the Agent Console with the following steps:

1. Launch the Agent Console on the system where the script will run. By default this is located in the Start Menu under “All Programs -> Uptime agent -> Uptime Agent Console.”
2. The first step after launching the Agent console is to set a password in the ‘Agent Options’ section and click save. This password will be used to authenticate with the agent before running the script.
3. After setting the password, tell the agent where the custom script is located on the server by clicking on the ‘Advanced’ option in the dropdown list and selecting ‘Custom Scripts.’
4. On the Custom Scripts screen, you should see an example similar to:
   • Custom Command: dir
   • Path to Script: cmd.exe /c "dir c:"
5. To continue this show-temp example, set the parameters to something similar to:
   
   • Custom Command: temp
   • Path to Script: cmd.exe /c “C:scriptsshow_temp.pl” (note: make sure to click Add/Edit before closing the window, otherwise your command will not be saved).
6. If you haven’t done so yet, click Save, and Yes when asked to restart the agent. This will ensure that your new settings take effect.

The following is a sample configuration. Note the additional folder named rexec_commands , which contains a key/value pair of the command key.

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[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\uptime software\up.time agent]
"CmdsTimeout"=dword:00000014
"Port"=dword:0000270e
"MaxClients"=dword:00000005
"Debug"=dword:00000000
"CmdsPassword"="secretpassword"
"LogFile"="log.txt"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\uptime software\up.time agent\rexec_commands] 
"dir"= cmd.exe /c "dir c:"
"show-temp"= cmd.exe /c "C:\scripts\show_temp.pl"

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Step 2 - Creating the Monitoring Station Script

The next step is to write the monitoring station script that will attempt to execute your agent side script, validate the output, and then return status or performance information to Uptime Infrastructure Monitor.

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1. The script must return at least one line of output to the system console. Uptime Infrastructure Monitor will use this output to determine the status of the custom service monitor.
2. The script must exit with a success status, unless there has been a problem during the execution of the script or you want to force a status for the service monitor. Acceptable return codes are:
   • exit 0 - The script executed without any errors, all output produced from the script will be parsed by Uptime Infrastructure Monitor to determine the service monitor status.
   • exit 1 - The service monitor status will be set to WNG (warning) and an outage will be recorded. The console output from the script will be placed in the custom service monitor status message.
   • exit 2 - The service monitor status will be set to CRIT (critical) and an outage will be recorded. The console output from the script will be placed in the custom service monitor status message.
3. The script must accept the host name of the agent system as the first argument. Uptime Infrastructure Monitor will automatically add this argument to the arguments that are passed to the script.

In most cases, the monitoring station script will contact an agent system and attempt to run a predefined agent-side script like the one that was defined in step 1 above. You can use any transport tool -- such as rexec, rsh, or ssh -- to contact the agent system.

However, uptime software IDERA recommends using the bundled agentcmd utility the netcat utility to contact your agent systems from your monitoring station script:

• To get started with custom scripts, or for implementations with only a handful of custom monitor instances, use agentcmd. The agentcmd utility is commonly called in the format listed below to execute a command on the agent side system. Please note that this utility is a helper tool, if you are using many custom monitor instances we recommend using an alternate tool.
  This example uses the settings that were configured above to execute the agent side script:

  Format:

   

  Code Block
  /usr/local/uptime/scripts/agentcmd [-s/+s] -p [agent port] [agent hostname] rexec [password] [path]

   

  Example:

   

  Code Block
  /usr/local/uptime/scripts/agentcmd -p 9998 my-agent rexec secretpassword /opt/uptime-agent/my-scripts/show_temp.sh my-arguments

   

  For more information, click on Using the agentcmd Utility.

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