Product Suite Information

Each member of the Acrasoft suite of products is a useful and powerful tool for you to use in your application, however, their real strength can be realized when you use them together.

For example, suppose as an administrator, your job is to monitor a large number of computers on a network, and you have several responsibilities:

1. You are interested in specific events in the NT event logs of those computers, and wish to diagnose certain memory problems logged by the system.

2. You want to track the movement of certain files in and out of common directories on those file servers.

3. You want to monitor the disk space on each server.

4. You need to be able to restart third-party services that keep failing for unknown reasons.

5. You need to download some data files from an ftp site or server, in order to process them via some tedious and repetitive task each day.

6. You need a system that will inform you of all the above events as they happen, without distracting you as you work unless you really want to be interrupted, and allowing you to instantly review the last few hours worth of transactions.

Sound like your job? Well, here’s how we can help. Let’s start with the last item, because it solves lots of problems just by itself.

If you install our MessagePad utility on your workstation ( or wherever you spend the most time ), it acts as a scrolling message board to which you can post text messages from any machine on the network, including color information. You can configure it to only pop up when a new message comes in, and stay minimized the rest of the time. You can use colors to color messages based on the source server, or color according to priority, or however you like. It stores hundreds of messages, so you can quickly review them. You send messages to MessagePad with our free SendMsg utility, which you can copy to any machine you want to be a message source. You can embed a SendMsg line in the middle of batch files to inform you that they are being processed, or call it directly from inside of any other application.

We’ll come back to MessagePad though. What about the rest of the jobs?

The solution to the first scenario is LogWatcher. If you install LogWatcher on your workstation, you can identify all the NT logs on all the servers that you want to examine, and review them with just a single mouse click. However, LogWatcher is an event log scanner, and you can set up watch groups to look for just about anything you want in any combination. When LogWatcher finds what you have specified in a watch group, it executes a task, which can be a lengthy sequence of commands. Depending on your requirements, you can send an e-mail to yourself, send a MessagePad message to your desktop, run a file transfer, to name but a few commands. LogWatcher takes this burden off you.

The next three scenarios can be handled by our AutoPilot product. AutoPilot is a multithreaded scheduler that executes tasks based on a wide variety of triggers. A task can be scheduled for a certain time, a certain interval, or on something more exotic, like on a service starting or stopping, or a directory change. The cool part is that the task kicked off by the trigger uses exactly the same commands as LogWatcher, so once you learn one, you have learned both. In fact, you can even drag and drop the tasks between our applications to make copies!

So, you add some file triggers to monitor directories, and write an e-mail task to send yourself a note. You add a service trigger to trap when a service fails, and launch a task to restart that service. Finally, add a disk space trigger to send a warning e-mail. Send yourself a MessagePad message so you know it happened!

Finally, your last assignment. The best candidate here is GroundControl . GroundControl is our script processor, and it picks up where AutoPilot and LogWatcher leave off. GroundControl supports over 130 commands, including if/then/goto branching, while loops, interactive message boxes, SendKeys and DDE. You can launch and control just about any Windows application, and perform many common system functions. A powerful combination is to use LogWatcher and Autopilot to run GroundControl scripts.

You have several design options. You can have AutoPilot execute a small batch file that does the file transfer for you, and then launch a GroundControl script to process the file, or you can just have AutoPilot launch GroundControl and have it perform the file transfer before it processes the file. The actual file processing may include launching several other applications in turn, or asking the user a question. In any case, GroundControl will handle it.

To return to MessagePad, many of the scenarios above included sending a MessagePad note to your workstation to inform you of task progress, or problems of some kind. MessagePad supports an alert feature that lets you look for key text in a message and run a task. This alert task is configured exactly the same way as the LogWatcher and AutoPilot tasks, which means you only need to learn one product to learn all three. Using these alerts, you can have programs and batch files all over the network sending updates to your machine, and using the alert, you can pop up message boxes for the important ones.

Hopefully, this illustrates how all our applications are meant to work together. LogWatcher and AutoPilot can run quietly looking for problems on the network, doing routine tasks. GroundControl can fill in the gaps, doing the really complicated tasks that need a little more flexibility or user input. Finally, all these applications can send you MessagePad notes, popping up the occasional message box to remind you that our suite is doing your job for you while you concentrate on the important stuff.
If you have any questions about how our products work together, drop us a line. You’ll be glad you did!