Simple Admin Tricks: Quick & Dirty Monitoring

From time to time, you’ll need to monitor a port to see if there’s a problem brewing.  For smaller companies, it can be quite a chore to deploy some sort of commercial or open-source monitoring solution (e.g., NAGIOS-based stuff), when all you want to do is do some quick and dirty monitoring. Example: you just want to check if a port is up or down and be alerted immediately so you can troubleshoot without having to go through a complicated configuration process.

Well, there are a ton of command-line tools that let you do just that.

For our example, we need two tools:

portqry.exe: this is basically a port pinger

Written by Microsoft
Description: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310099
Download link:http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=89811747-C74B-4638-A2D5-AC828BDC6983&displaylang=en

bmail.exe: this is a simple command line tool to send an email using a batch file

Written by Craig Peacock from Beyond Logic
http://www.beyondlogic.org/solutions/cmdlinemail/cmdlinemail.htm

So, how does this work?

All you need is a simple batch file that you would call from Windows Task Scheduler, e.g. every 5 or 10 minutes:

<ip> = IP or Name of the machine you want to check
<port> = port you want to check

The default timeout is 30 seconds.

And there you go!

Every time the batch file runs, it checks to see if it can reach the port you specify: if it can’t, it’ll send an email through the relay server of your choice and send an alert to your cell phone.

Too easy