Topic: RadioSparx - General Issues and Questions
Article ID: KB3659
Last Reviewed: Sep 19, 2014
How Does the Service Monitoring System Work?
The RadioSparx Service Monitoring system was created to help you be able to monitor each computer that is supposed to be playing music, to guard against extended down time when music should be playing but, for some reason, is not playing.
The system works by polling the status of your active players every five minutes to see if any are not reporting properly. If any systems are detected to not be reporting properly, if you have configured the system to notify you via email, an email message will be generated to the email address(es) of your choice. The reporting period can be configured to be five minutes or at longer intervals if you prefer.
The system works by polling the status of your active players every five minutes to see if any are not reporting properly. If any systems are detected to not be reporting properly, if you have configured the system to notify you via email, an email message will be generated to the email address(es) of your choice. The reporting period can be configured to be five minutes or at longer intervals if you prefer.
By default, the monitoring system will not be enabled for a new account, so in order to receive notifications, you will need to enable it by specifying whether it should notify the current account's primary and/or secondary email address, the parent account (if applicable for User accounts under a sub-account) or the grandparent account (for User accounts under a sub-account under a reseller account).
How To Enable Monitoring - To enable notifications, click on MyAccount at the top right of the site, then Player Settings, and scroll down to the Service Monitoring section of the screen where you can configure the various settings. Make sure to save the changes after you make any changes, so that your changes are stored properly for your account.
How To Enable Monitoring - To enable notifications, click on MyAccount at the top right of the site, then Player Settings, and scroll down to the Service Monitoring section of the screen where you can configure the various settings. Make sure to save the changes after you make any changes, so that your changes are stored properly for your account.
Avoid Repeating Notifications - The system will continue to send email notifications until any reported problem is corrected. If the problem is related to the Internet being down, generally such problems will self-correct after some amount of time and the alert notifications will stop. For a problem with the actual player, it is necessary for you to take action for any systems that are reported to be down so that the "down" notification ceases for the affected players. This could include simply changing the affected player's status to "stopped" so notifications stop for that computer, or relaunching the player on the affected computer to resume proper music playback, or rebooting the player in the event that it has somehow malfunctioned.
Links in Notification Emails - You will see that in each notification email, you can hyperlink right to the Account Settings screen for each player, in case you want to change who gets notified for each player. Or also you can hyperlink to the Status and Controls screen for each player, where you can take some action remotely from the player's computer. If you have already been receiving notification emails from the monitoring system, take a look at the instructions at the bottom of any of the notification emails you have been receiving.
Status and Controls Screen – This screen is just the User Activity report ran for date range of "today". If you don't want to monitor a particular player, click the RESET button there and it will set its status to "stopped" so the monitoring system will stop monitoring it. Otherwise if it is showing "Playing" but its date/time is in red, this means that at least 5 minutes has elapsed since the player reported properly. So for those players, you will want to take action to get them playing properly again, or if they are not supposed to be playing anyhow, just click the RESET button to change their status to "stopped" and they will not be monitored again until someone starts playing them again.
Unintentional Triggering of Down Notifications - If a user is playing the music and then just closes the browser, the player's status is still "playing" at that point, so after five minutes you will get a notification about it from the monitoring system. This obviously is undesirable for you, but you can solve it by simply clicking the link in the monitoring email to get to the Status and Control screen for that player and click RESET for that player. Or alternately inform the user to first make sure to click STOP in the player before closing the browser. This will update that player's status to "stopped" so it won't then show up in the monitoring report as a down system.
Use Custom Schedule - Or alternately, if you want the music to stop automatically at a certain time, you can configure a schedule for the player, with a stop event configured to happen at a predetermined time, and then when that time comes the player will stop playing and go into countdown mode, and its status will change from "playing" to "countdown", and it will countdown until its next scheduled start time, and then it will start playing again and its status will update to "playing" as well.
Summary - By using the Service Monitoring system properly, you can minimize any downtime for your service and/or clients and help to keep the music flowing properly to the maximum extent possible.
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