Starfish Monitor

Installation

Beginning with Starfish ETL 3.8, the Starfish Monitor service is included and created when you install the Starfish Scheduler. The Monitor service's Startup Type is set to 'Manual' by default. If you wish to use this service, you should configure the settings (defined below), change the Startup Type to 'Automatic' and start the service.

Intended Purpose

The Starfish Monitor is intended to help ensure uptime for mission-critical systems integrations developed with our ETL tool. There are two components to this service, Monitor and Watchdog.

Monitor is intended to run on the same server as the Starfish Engine. Starfish maintains a log of each time a successful job is run. If your job is supposed to run once every night, then every 24 hours or so this log should be updated. Monitor reviews this log, and if a configured amount of time has past since it has seen an update (in our example say 25 hours) then it will send a notification email to the administrator you've configured. This is useful in cases where perhaps a Windows update has left IIS in a state of needing to be restarted.

Watchdog can be considered an extension of this by ensuring the system is constantly running. It's purpose is to occasionally ping a central server at Starfish ETL, for example every 5 minutes. Our server checks to ensure we've heard from your server successfully in the past 20 minutes (configurable). If we haven't heard from your sever, we'll send a notification to your administrator. This is useful in the case where a server has been unintentionally shut down, loses internet connectivity, or other unforeseen circumstances.