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# Black box monitoring of Windows servers
- URL: https://ptarmiganlabs.com/black-box-monitoring-of-windows-servers/
- Published: 2020-06-24T13:31:18.000Z
- Updated: 2023-01-26T06:53:48.000Z
- Author: Göran Sander
- Tags: Windows, #Import 2025-03-29 20:52

This is part 2 in a series about how [healthchecks.io](https://healthchecks.io/?ref=ptarmiganlabs.com) can be used together with Qlik Sense Enterprise on Windows (QSEoW).

Previous articles:  
[Oh data where art thou?](https://ptarmiganlabs.com/oh-data-where-art-thou/)

## Windows Server just works… right?

Usually, yes.  
Still, things do happen and it certainly would be nice to get an push alert when a server hasn’t checked in according to schedule.

The most common monitoring – for Windows/Linux/…. servers, databases, Qlik Sense etc is based on the tool keeping an eye on some measurement and then alert when the measurement goes beyond some threshold.  
This is fine, and this is a very important monitoring use case. But in cases where a server just hangs the last measurement received might be fine, and no alerts are sent.

Black box monitoring kind of reverses the roles:

> **The monitored system has to prove that it’s doing fine. Failing to do so within some predefined schedule will trigger an alarm, with an optional alert being sent.*

The previous article showed how this concept can be used to ensure that some Qlik Sense app has reloaded as intended, before a specific time each day. A concrete, common use case would be that yesterday’s data should be processed and loaded into Sense before 7 am next day. Alert if not)

Now, let’s use the same tool and concept to monitor also the Windows servers that Qlik Sense Enterprise on Windows (QSEoW) runs on.

Once again, [healthchecks.io](https://healthchecks.io/?ref=ptarmiganlabs.com) is used as the monitoring tool.

This time the monitored systems will be three Windows servers, on top of which a Qlik Sense Enterprise cluster runs.

The video above best shows what happens, with the text below providing some details.

## 1 – The basics

One of the monitored servers, “pro2-win3″, goes offline. As this is the main access server in the Sense cluster, users working in Qlik apps will certainly notice that something happened.

There are of course many ways a sysadmin or Sense platform admin could be notified that something happened, the beauty of the concept shown here is the simplicity. Easy to understand, setup and operate – yet powerful enough for most scenarios.

The goal here is to have the monitoring tool detect that the server has fallen over and send alerts to the sysadmin.

## 2 – Windows Task Scheduler

The standard Windows Task Scheduler is used to ping the monitoring tool every 15 minutes. The “ping” consists of the server somehow visiting a specific URL that has been defined in the monitoring tool. Pinging that URL tells the monitoring tool that pro2-win3 is online. Applications (such as Sense) on that server may still be malfunctioning, but at least the server is up.

## 3 – curl or PowerShell – you choose

Somehow the Windows Task Scheduler must call a program that makes a simple visit to the specified URL.

This can for sure be achieved using PowerShell, in this example I however used curl, which is ****THE** tool for doing http requests from the command line, no matter what platform you work on. There is a stand alone [Windows version available](https://curl.se/windows/?ref=ptarmiganlabs.com).

## 4 – Summary

That’s it, really. healthchecks.io will check the time passed from last ping from pro2-win3, and if it’s been more than 15 minutes (as configured in healthchecks.io) plus a few minutes grace time since the last ping, an alarm (and optional alert) will be triggered.

Alerts can be sent to lots of different tools:

![](https://ptarmiganlabs.com/content/images/2023/01/2020-06-24_14-23-53.png)