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. If you are already running a previous version of Starfish ETL, it is recommended that you apply updates to all components of the software, then reinstall the Starfish Scheduler from the installation files to ensure the service is registered correctly.

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.

Monitor Service Configuration

The settings below must be configured before enabling the Starfish Monitor service. You will edit the StarfishMonitor.exe.config file which should be in the same folder where Starfish Scheduler was installed.

EnginePath

Location of the 'engine.db' file for the StarfishEngine instance you want to monitor.

ProblemInterval

In seconds, how much time should be allowed to pass since the last successful job was run before sending notifications.

CheckInterval

SMTPServer

SMTP hostname to use when sending emails. Leave defaults to use the provided Starfish account.

SMTPPort

SMTP server port to use when sending emails. Typically 25 or 587.

SMTPUsername

Username to use for the SMTP connection if authentication is required.

SMTPPassword

Password to use for the SMTP connection if authentication is required.

EnableSSL

Whether the SMTP server's connections (configured above) require an SSL connection.

MailFromAddress

Address the email should appear to have been sent from.

MailFromDisplay

Display name for the address the email should appear to have been sent from.

EmailRecipients

Who to send the notifications to, separate multiples with a comma.

CompanyName

Name of your company - will be used in the notification email that gets sent. If you're using Watchdog (below), this MUST match the Company Name for your Starfish license.

Debug

Logs additional entries to the event log for use when debugging configuration issued. Ensure this is false for production environments.