ITSBITS^® Job-1 is designed to help IT people quickly, proactively, spot and diagnose problems on the computers they maintain. Job-1 can be configured to monitor up to forty-five services on a given machine. It is configured to show up as a vertical strip (something like the one shown at right) or a horizontal strip.

If you look at the right or bottom of the Job-1 strip, you will note that it has 2 buttons. The first is the movement button (marked with 3 slash marks.) The second button is the "cfg" (configure) button.

When you click on the movement button, you will see a special movement cursor. By placing your mouse cursor on the movement button and holding down on that button, you can drag/move the Job-1 strip to any part of the screen.

When you click the Configuration button, you will open a "configuration screen" something like the one shown below.

Configuration--General Tab

As you can see there are several tabs you can choose from and each of these will be discussed in the document below. The first one, as shown below, is the "General" tab.

The "Machine Name" text box should be the name of your computer. If you do not know the name of your computer, you can leave this field blank. (You can see the name of your computer by going to the Control Panel >> System >> Computer Name.)

In the large list-box on the left, you will see the services that are installed on your computer. If you note, each service is shown with its "friendly name" followed by the actual service name enclosed in parentheses. Finally, the status of the service is shown--stopped or running.

The right list box shows the services that are being monitored. Each service is given a short abbreviation which will appear in the "lights" on the Job-1 strip. The actual name of the service is shown in parentheses here, too.

Between the two large list boxes, there are four buttons. To add a service to the monitored services, highlight it in the left box, then click the ">" button. To remove a service from the monitored services list, highlight it in the right-hand list box. Then click the "<" button. You can use the Up/Down buttons to change the arrangement of the services being monitored.

Notice that below the monitored services list there is a count of the monitored services.

The test interval field is the next field on the screen. This interval, the length of time between testing to see if the monitored services are running, is given in milliseconds. Hence 1,000 milliseconds is one second. That means 60,000 will be a 10-second test interval.

Opacity percentage is the next field. You can run at any setting from 100%, which is no opacity, to 0% which is invisible. We recommend that you use seomthing around 60% so that you can read the Job-1 strip. Because of "undocumented features" we have encountered, we also recommend that you use 99% rather than 100%.

While Job-1 defaults to a horizontal strip, you can click the "Use Vertical Format" check box to use a vertical strip. This may prove necessary if you are using an older monitor with somewhat lower resolution numbers.

Given certain screens and possibilities, it is possible in rare cases to cause the strip to move off your screen in strange ways. Should this occur, click the "Reset Location" box and then the "OK" button. This will reset the strip to its screen-center location so that you can start over.

The Doorway-out button will terminate the Job-1 program in its entirety. The OK button will close the configuration screen, enable all configuration changes you have made, and leave the Job-1 strip on your screen.

Configuration--Email Switches Tab

For each monitored service, you can determine whether or not an email notification will be sent should the service stop for any reason. The default is that email notifications are not sent, but if you click to place an "x" in the email-switches, an email will be sent. Hence, the example shown here will result in an email being sent if any monitored service stops.

This screen sets up how to send email. The top 3 fields are for the IT person or technician who will need to work on the problem if a service has stopped.

The next field is to show who the email is from. Normally, we recommend you use "Job-1-YourServerName@YourDomain.xxx" as the sender address. However, on some setups, for security purposes, you may need to use a valid email address found in your domain. Your email administrator should be able to tell you if this is a necessity, but if not you can test it simply enough.

The next field is the "Email Server IP" entry. In many cases you can, in fact, you may have to, use the WINS name of the server. In other cases, you may have to use the actual IP address for the email server in question.

The "Minutes before escalation email(s) are sent" field comes next. This is pretty straight forward. A timer will be set by Job-1. If the stopped service is still down when this amount of time has passed, emails will be sent to the escalation email addresses shown in the lower three fields on the form.

In all cases, if a field has no entry, there is no attempt to send an email for that field.

Finally, you will note that in the lower-right corner of this tab-screen there is a "Send test emails" button. If you click this button, a test email will be sent to each of the 6 email addresses shown on this tab-screeen. The emails will clearly show that they are test emails. The subject for the email will be "Test Email--Please acknowledge." The text will be something like this:

On computer XXXXXXXXX, The ITSBITS® Job-1 service monitor is running and has sent you a test email. Date/time=10/24/2005 at 22:35:44 This is only a test email. Please, acknowledge this to your IT administrator.

Just so you'll know, a "service stopped" email will have the subject, "ITSBITS® JOB-1 Monitored Service Has Stopped." The body of the email will be something like this:

On computer XXXXXXXX, Monitored service W3SVC stopped. Date/time=10/24/2006 at 21:17:47 Escalation will occur in 20 minutes.

An escalation email will have the subject, "ITSBITS® JOB-1 ESCALATION! A monitored service has stopped." The body of the email will be something like:

On computer XXXXXXXXX, Monitored service W3SVC stopped. Stopped at 10/24/2006 Now=10/24/2006 at 21:19:49 This escalation is the last email Job-1 will send.

If the stopped service should restart, an email will be sent notifying the people involved that the service has been reset. The subject will be "ITSBITS® JOB-1 Monitored Service Has Restarted." The body of the email will be something like:

On computer XXXXXXXXX, Monitored service W3SVC restarted. Date/time=10/24/2006 at 21:20:49

Configuration--Setup File Tab

Once you have configured your Job-1 strip as you want it, your settings are saved in the System Registry for fast access and periodic backup whenever you do a backup of system state. In addition, you can save your configuration to a file on your hard disk. This means you can replicate your favorite configuration with ease on other computers. This also lets you make test changes and then quickly restore your previous configuration.

The two text boxes on this screen show where to store your configuration and where to find and load it from respectively. To help you with this there are two search buttons on the screen as well. This means that once you have the path to the file you want specified in the appropriate box, you either click the "backup configuration" button or the "load configuration" button.

Configuration--Misc. Tab

There are currently two types of miscellaneous configurations for Job-1. The first is simply to say what color should be used for inactive "lights" in the Job-1 strip. This option exists because we have found that it can make it easier to see and read the strip and/or see the text on the window(s) under the strip at any given time.

The other miscellaneous configuration is what to tell the user if they inquire about a service by clicking on one of the active "lights" in the Job-1 strip. If the user clicks on a "light" an information box will appear for the user.

By using the miscellaneous configuration screeen you can put in a non-technical statement to give to the user and limit what they can see to that. Or, you can give full technical information plus the general statement you enter here.

You can very easily edit and/or insert your own information files. The files are simple .txt files which can be edited with any simple editor (i.e. Notepad) and they are stored in the same directory as your Job-1 program. An example of such a file is shown here:

DNS Server Enables DNS clients to resolve DNS names by answering DNS queries and dynamic DNS update requests. If this service is stopped, DNS updates will not occur. If this service is disabled, any services that explicitly depend on it will fail to start. Normal server path to executable: C:\WINDOWS\System32\dns.exe

We would like to ask that if you find standard services on your system that do not show up in the Job-1 information files supplied with the system, please, help us and other users by doing a quick little .txt file something like the one shown above and emailing it to us at ITSBITS^®. Email IHS

Configuration General Tab--Services Work

As a matter of convenience, you can right-click on a service's line in the left-hand services list. This will bring up a small menu where you can quickly see what services are dependent upon the selected service and/or what services the selected service depends upon. Additionally, if a service can be stopped, you can do that from the menu. You can also attempt to start a service from this small menu.