Question

I made a simple notifier command line application in C#. Basically I use the windows task scheduler and set it up to run this command line application at a certain time.

When this time is hit the command line application is ran all notifications are grabbed from a database(using linq to sql) formatted and sent by smtp to the right people.

Now how should I handle these scenarios

1. A database error occurs

Solution: Send a email to the admin to notify them that it failed and to check it out.

2. A smtp error occurs

Solution: ?????

So these are really the two things that could go wrong. There could be different combination’s of this.

Database error might occur and and smtp might occur too, Or only one or the other might occur.

So how to get this information to an admin or someone so they can fix it. I highly doubt that an admin would go and check every single day to see if the notification thing worked or not.

So basically how to make it fail safe or at least make it so that if something goes wrong a admin can come fix and it and just run the notifier manually and get everything back in sync.

Answer 1

Logging an Error to the EventLog could also be an option, providing that the Admin either checks the EventLog regularly or that you have monitoring systems that aggregate those errors.