Application Monitoring / mission critical application

[readyyy]

Hello

I coded a Visual Basic Application. The special thing about this Application is that it needs to be running 24 hours 7 Days a week.

There is a special API from an external Company attached to Visual Studio and the program, and this API crashes from time to time and make the Program stopping

I'm not sure how i can monitor the program. I need to be informed by SMS or mail if the program crashes or stop responding. I thought already about setting up a Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Server cluster for that, what you think about that and how would you solve that problem

 

[macleod1021]

Can ya give a little bit more information as to the type of program it is, specifics as to "how" the API crashes. There's ways to get a notification to your main app that can handle the error. Knowing a little bit more about the api and it's functions will help us give you the best piece of advice.

For generic api's, you could set up a Try Catch clause that will see if the api is available. If it's not, wait a predetermined or random amount of time and retry. Then set up a counter so that after x attempts at restarting it will notify you via your medium of choice. You can implement that by using something similar to this:

Try
Special.API.Somefunction()

Catch ex as Exemption
Couldnotrunsomefunctionsonotifyadmin()
End Try


This may or may not work in your case depending on factors relating to the api and how you're implementing it.