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Report TRUE availability of a server

I am a consultant for a large company with over 1000 servers. Recently, a server hung on a reboot from a patch exercise. The problem is, we didn't know about it. Nothing reported it as not being available for client access. We could ping it. Our patching software and our Tivoli (of which I know NOTHING about) didn't report it either.

Our boss asked if there was a simple way to access the servers after a reboot to make sure that they were available. I thought about other programs and utilities, but I could not come up with any way to GUARANTEE that the server was available outside of mapping a drive on each one which is unrealistic and too time consuming.

I got to thinking that the PERFECT tool would also be able to report if the server has frozen, and we could tell the users before they found out (good P.R. right??)

So, Experts, what is the best way to report TRUE avialability of a server?

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Brian Pierce

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Jay_Jay70

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Lee W, MVP

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svillardi

ASKER

Thanks for the ideas however I haven't seen anything that really solves the problem.

Now, I am not necessarily talking about services. I'm more concerned with a freeze / hang.
I do like the map a drive batch file idea, but I don't know anything about WMI or VB (as much as I wish I did). Maybe you could give me an idea of what it would look like. I know about the net use command, but after that, I am pretty lost. Yeah, like I said, not much of a programmer (LOL!).

As I said, we do monitor with Tivoli, but that doesn't seem to tell us when the OS is hung. I don't know much about Tivoli, as I don't support it, but it USUALLY will report when a server is down, but not when it's up and HUNG.

Any more thoughts??

Thanks,

Scott.....

Lee W, MVP

Really, it's the services you want to monitor - monitoring IP is not the best solution as you've found out. I'm not familiar with Tivoli, but check out and see if it has a client that can monitor services. If the service is stopped or hung, you need to be notified about that. Especially the server service. Some products claim to monitor services but they are just monitoring TCP Ports - and not usually the ones for Windows file sharing. Do some tests... I'll try to post more later, but next couple days are tough (time wise) for me.