FAQShop.com: Getting An Event to Notify only After ‘X’ Number of Occurrences

Getting An Event to Notify only After ‘X’ Number of Occurrences

What I have is a job that monitoring a web page using the http ping script that comes with MOM. What I have it do is if the page fails after 3 attempts it will restart the web services I have this running as a timed event every 5 minutes.

So if the page fails after 3 attempts within say 15 minutes) I want a script to page or notify the on call. But only after the 3 failures. My dilemma is not that I can't create a script to monitor the number of times the event has occurred but that I want it to say within 15 minutes 3 events have occurred and I need to notify someone. But if 3 events occurred in 8 hours to say, ok everything is fine.

Contributed By: Mike Betts [MVP MOM]
Have your http ping script increment a state variable, called "failed pages" or something, each time the ping script detects the webserver is down. Have the http ping script run, as you say, every 5 minutes.

Now create another script, to run on the same machine, as a timed event which runs every 15 minutes. This script should examine the value of "failed pages". If it is 3 then raise an alert. If it is less than 3 then simply have the script reset it to 0. Using this method you will only fire an alert when the ping script has failed 3 times in a row, i.e. in 15 minutes.

In order to reset the variable if it doesn’t meet the criteria you’ll have to add a line something like the following to your script:

totalfailedpings=0