Greetings,
I was really hoping you could give me some advise on performing a "heartbeat" function on workstations. I have a solution on server that works but I really don't like it. I have an account with a monitoring company that provides a unique address to issue a http request to. If a request is not received once per hour it rings in as overdue. For servers I use a wget script under windows that looks like this:
"C:program files (x86)GNUWin32binwget.exe" http://0.0.0.0/m/0000-0aaa00/
Del "C:wget*.htm" /q
Del "C:wget*.html" /q
Using this method wget will download the page and reset the heartbeat and then delete the htm or html file that was downloaded. I have set it up as a scheduled task running every 20 minutes so the machine would have 3 chances to check in before the alarm would be sent. This works for me but there is a glaring problem: 1) Its Messy, 2) Its Visible to the user for a fraction of a second, 3) It takes time to setup, deploy and modify.
I have been searching the internet high and low for a program what will sit in the system tray and get a defined website on a schedule completely invisible to the user (except for the tray icon of course). However I can not find anything that will do this but I know it exists in other software as a check in method.
Do you have any ideas on how I can improve this? Do you know of a program free or paid that does this using the parameters I have provided?
Thanks in advance