To ensure that your customers, users or employees have access to internet at all times, in a mission critical environment, you may need to guarantee that your ISA server is available 24 X 7 365 days a year. Now if you cluster your ISA servers then you can come close to achieving this goal. What can also happen is that you do not have budget or intentions of having more then one ISA server.
What you need then is to be able to monitor your ISA services no matter where you are. In this tutorial I will show you how to enable your ISA server to be able to email you and or SMS’ing (short message service) you to let you know that ISA server service/s have failed.
I will also show you how you can restart them, if they fail, automatically. This can be very useful because you can also setup an alert to let you know that your ISA (web service has either stopped or started.
So the scenario will be…. Your ISA server service fails. ISA’s built in alert will then e-mail you or SMS you via an e-mail SMS gateway and you will receive this message on your mobile phone.
ISA will restart the ISA service that has failed. And the service will then restart. Remember you can also configure your ISA server to SMS when a service stops or starts. So in this scenario you will receive an SMS/e-mail telling you that your ISA service has failed. If you configure the Start and Stop alerts then you will also receive SMS/e-mail alerts letting you know that the services have stopped or started.
What needs to be done? First you need to customize the internal Service not responding alert.
Creating a custom alert within ISA.
1. First locate the alerts object under Monitoring and configuration, then right click Alerts then, new and then, alert.
2. You are then presented with the screen above, give the alert a name. Then click next>.
3. Now in the event drop down box select Service not responding. In the Additional condition box you can select the service that you would like to monitor. I have selected the Web Proxy Service. Then click next>.
4. You will then be presented with this screen I have selected all of the options. As I will be using all of them in this scenario. Then click next>.
5. This screen will then be presented above where you can configure your mail settings. You can browse for your SMTP server or exchange server or any server that has the SMTP relay agent installed on it. If you are using your ISP SMTP settings make sure that you have allowed SMTP though on your ISA server. In the from box type in a name that will inform you that it is coming from your ISA server. In the To box you can type in your email address and in the Cc/carbon copy address field you can type in the mobile cell number followed by the @ and then the address of your cell phone SMS gateway. This will ensure that you will receive both an email and an SMS. Now click next>.
6. This screen is where you select the service that you would like to stop if you get the alert. I have selected the web proxy service. Then click next>.
7. This screen will then appear, this is the screen where you need to start up the previously stopped service. Select Web Proxy for this exercise and then click next>.
8. In this screen you can check your settings and then confirm them by clicking finish.
Summary: In this tutorial we have configured a built in ISA alert to enable ISA to let us know when ISA itself is failing. Isn’t this great? Further more you can be alerted anywhere that you maybe as long as you have you mobile phone. I hope this helps you to ensure that you ISA server it up at all times.
