Program Fail monitoring on the cheap
I needed a program fail monitor to tell me when 2CCR was ‘of the air’, and I wanted it cheap. In fact, I didn’t want to pay for it. Not now, anyway. I wanted a quick and dirty solution to let me know when something had gone wrong. There’s plenty of horror stories of when things go wrong and the station goes off the air, and I didn’t want any of this to happen to me.
There’s plenty of solutions out there, such as the Elan Program Monitoring systems. But these cost at least $800, and won’t actually notify me when a problem occurs – they just trigger another program source to start playing. What I wanted was a SMS notification when our program source failed, and stayed dead for more than sixty seconds (so small operator mishaps won’t disturb me).
After searching high and low, it turns out that Pirate Radio has a great software solution, and it’s totally free! It’s called Pira CZ Silence Detector, and will listen to the line in source to the computer and perform a defined set of actions whenever the audio stays below a set threshold for a set period of time.
The different types of actions it can perform are great. Here’s the feature list:
The Pira CZ Silence Detector actually can:
- Send alert email message (now supports also SSL authentication!)
- Save actual screenshot (and optionally attach it to email)
- Run application(s), play backup mp3 file(s)
- Reboot/shutdown the system
- Kill application(s)
- Drive port pin
- Send HTTP query (inform about the status on your web site)
- Speak using the Windows SAPI
- and more!
What more could you ask it to do? Any task imaginable could be performed by this powerful but small app – the ability to run applications and switch a COM port pin enable you to do whatever you want with whatever bit of equipment or software you have.
However, the task I really wanted to do was Send an SMS. This isn’t on the list, but sending email alerts is! Using a SMS Gateway, it’s easy to get an email sent via SMS. I use SMS Global, who allow me to send an email to a special email address, and then the contents of that email are transferred to a SMS message – all within seconds!!
It’s all quite magical. I loaded this freeware onto our logger (it already has an incoming audio feed) and did a quick firewall rejig to route the email traffic through to the server. Now I will receive a notification on my mobile whenever we have more than sixty seconds of dead air. Thankfully it hasn’t happened during the early morning, but I’m sure the day will come sooner or later. Probably when I least expect it.
The next task to undertake is to set this application to play some music whenever the program fails, rather than just sending a notification. I’m thinking I need some really quirky song to play, so anyone who works with us will know when something’s gone wrong, just by the music which is playing. Any suggestions? I also need to get some of our extra network gear onto a UPS so my notifications will arrive even during a power outage. If anyone wants to donate a UPS to us, that would be great (it doesn’t have to be huge, a small one will do).