Question

I have a Windows 2003 Server that uses IIS to host a legacy ASP.NET web service that connects to a database on a remote Oracle database server that I have no control over. The problem is that the database server goes down every week or two, but then comes back up after about 5 minutes. I have to then restart IIS to remove any corrupt connections before my web service works again.

What is the best way to trigger an event (i.e. email myself and/or reset IIS) when a specific error code occurs (in this case it will be an ORA- type error, but I can get the Windows error code)?

IIS Setting?

Task Scheduler? (limited to scheduled tasks only I believe on Windows 2003 server, eg. per day/week/month etc)

Powershell Script?

Other options?

I know in Windows 2008 Server that you can configure the Task Scheduler to trigger an event when the server experiences certain error codes in its Error Log… but I can’t find anything like this in the Task Scheduler of Windows 2003 Server.

Thanks.

Answer 1

I wrote a powershell shell script to monitor the sql server errorlog and report on specific errors. I stored where I last stop reading and then continued on from that point the next time I ran the script. This is the part that actually reads the log. Then you just need to store the position in some temp file and run this as a scheduled task. And send an email if the error occurs or even restart some service.

$path = $logs.file
Write-Host $path
if($currentLog.lastpos -ne $null){$pos = $currentLog.lastpos}
else{$pos = 0}
if($logs.enc -eq $null){$br = New-Object System.IO.BinaryReader([System.IO.File]::Open($path, [System.IO.FileMode]::Open, [System.IO.FileAccess]::Read, [System.IO.FileShare]::ReadWrite))}
else{
    $encoding = $logs.enc.toUpper().Replace('-','')
    if($encoding -eq 'UTF16'){$encoding = 'Unicode'}
    $br = New-Object System.IO.BinaryReader([System.IO.File]::Open($path, [System.IO.FileMode]::Open, [System.IO.FileAccess]::Read, [System.IO.FileShare]::ReadWrite), [System.Text.Encoding]::$encoding)
}
$required = $br.BaseStream.Length - $pos
if($required -lt 0){
    $pos = 0
    $required = $br.BaseStream.Length
}
if($required -eq 0){$br.close(); return $null}
$br.BaseStream.Seek($pos, [System.IO.SeekOrigin]::Begin)|Out-Null
$bytes = $br.ReadBytes($required)
$result = [System.Text.Encoding]::Unicode.GetString($bytes)
$split = $result.Split("`n")
foreach($s in $split)
{
    if($s.contains("  Error:"))
    {
        #Filter events here
    }
}
$currentLog.lastpos = $br.BaseStream.Position 
$br.close()