App Portal Alert when Deployment Technology has an outage

[dbeckner]

@jdempsey @CharlesW 

I think I know the answer to this, but wanted to know if there is a way in App Portal to alert when the deployment technology is down. We have had a handful of outages with MECM in the past year which naturally leads to collection inserts not occurring. Short of manually checking the error logs or submitted request have you seen anyone implement a solution for reporting when deployments have not occurred in XX amount of time or when the connection between app portal and the deployment technology is failing?

[jdempsey]

I haven't seen anything custom, but wouldn't the failed inserts/deployments eventually hit the "nothing has happened in XX minutes/hours/days" timer and get marked as failed?  Are you looking for something to trigger sooner than that without shortening the timer?  Or is it not actually starting the timer because the insert fails?

[dbeckner]

Correct. The timer isnt starting because the inserts fail. Even if it were we have the timer set to 8 days before automatic fail because we have users on VPN who don't always leave their workstations connected to the network.

Ideally the MECM team would report to us if there is an outage, but we were hoping to have a way to get notified by App Portal if it cannot connect to MECM at all so we could alert our users that software is not currently deploying.

Right now we complete a daily systems check for successful connection to MECM which may just be the process if theres nothing automated that we can do.

[CharlesW · Accepted solution]

Failed inserts will continue until the request is canceled.. There is no time limit (there should be). With regards to the alerts available in App Broker, there are not very many things that will trigger an alert email to get sent. Obviously, failure to process inserts will trigger one. If using legacy inventory functionality (nobody is) then you have the option to send an alert when inventory is low. 

I think that your best bet would be to setup your own monitoring. Perhaps a powershell invoked by a scheduled task.. You could invoke a WMI call against the SCCM server, and then email somebody, if it does not respond.. As an example, you might invoke something as simple as the following to get the SCCM build number:

Get-wmiobject -ComputerName "SUP-SCCM-CW" -namespace root\sms\site_CW1 -Query "Select * from SMS_SetupInfo where id='Version'"

Other options might include hitting the ESD Web Service, rather than invoking the WMI call directly. 

[dbeckner]

Thats a great idea and I was considering something like that @CharlesW if there wasnt something in App Portal that was available. Appreciate the insight guys.