Idea for a cool tool

[Guest.Visitor]

For detecting job start/end/MSGW, Message or Job monitors of iSeries Navigator (aka Operations Navigator before V5R2, which does not have one of those types of monitors). Or roll your own message-queue monitor. I think you can use TAPI over an iSeries modem to send text.

[Guest.Visitor]

Actually since most cell phone providers allow you to send text messages to a cell phone via e-mail you should be able to send it using the SNDDST command. We do this here but we use Byteware's messenger plus to monitor for messages. (6105551212@mobile.att.net for example)

[mhajny@thompsonfoods.com]

The text message via email is probably the way I will go. I would like the monitor application to run from the pc. Not really sure why, but it seems better suited to run away from the platform I am monitoring. My problem now becomes how I monitor the active jobs from visual basic. By using Ops Nav (we have v4r5) I know you can view your jobs on the 400, so there must be an api or dll that CA/Express uses to get this info. Anyone have ideas?

[dacust]

I'd think it'd be much better to do the monitoring on the 400 using the existing commands and APIs, then have it send messages (any way you want: sockets, mail, etc) to the PC. It could send whatever data you want to the PC on a schedule. Then if the PC doesn't get the packet on time, it can check communications, then send a message that the 400 is un-reachable, or communications is down. If you do all the monitoring from the PC, I think you will be more limited as to what you can monitor, and you will have more LAN traffic. Also, any logging you do on events will loose the logging if communications are down between platforms. My general philosophy is do the processing on the machine where the data/processes are and only transmit results. (sometimes transmit raw data and then do all processing on the secondary machine). In this case, having the PC on the side will only give you the additional capability of sending a message if it is down. We actually accomplish this by having the 400s monitor each other, so we avoid having a PC involved at all.

[mhajny@thompsonfoods.com]

I know this has been done before, but my department is long on knowledge and short on money, so I want to do it myself. Here is the concept: I want to know when a certain job has been started, has ended or has a message waiting. I want to be notified of these events (of which I can pre-define) via text messaging on my cell phone. I have skills in RPG/400, CL, etc. I could (need to) learn ILE, and use Visual Basic 6.0 on the pc. Any ideas?