Hi, I have a basic question here. I have some AT systems running during the trading hour and checked the operating situation of it from time to time . But once when I approached to check the system, I found my computer machine has rebooted, and no trading program was running at all. Later I reinstalled the whole window xp system and everything has been fine since then, I thought maybe it was a virus or something irregular happened. I am not sure such thing will not happen in the future. So my question is: is there a way/software that can monitor the running of my AT system, giving out a (sound ) alert whenever something wrong is going on, or when the AT system is halted /exited irregularly ?
For the OS rebooting unexpectedly, you'd have to plant something in the OS startup sequence to alert you. For the ATS crashing, you could have a monitor process that the ATS would have to periodically check-in with -- if it failed to check-in, then the monitor would alert you.
You need to consider all the different failure modes eg hardware/OS/ power failure trading software failure communications failure ( eg ADSL failure) broker failure exchange failure and what you can do about each. For example, if you have a fixed IP address, I believe there are some services available that will ping you every so often and send a SMS alert on a certain number of missed responses. I general, the use of heart beat messages of some type is the only reliable way telling if some machine/process/comms link has gone AWOL. I am of the view that ATS software should be capable of sending SMS alerts when it detects certain conditions.
A couple of further thoughts on reliability: * Review the system event log regularly, looking for any reported irregularities. * IDE amd SATA hard drives have a facility called SMART in their firmware that attempts to monitor the health of the drive. There are free tools available to access SMART functions. You can sometimes get interesting warnings from SMART such as "Drive failure expected within 24 hours". In such as case it would be prudent to replace the drive. * Check your CPU temperature. An overheating CPU can result in spontaneous reboots. It might be due to an incorrectly fitted heatsink or failed fan. * Perhaps run a memory test eg memtest86 every few months. Such a test is more rigorous than the BIOS startup tests.
Thanks for all the replys. My ATS can alert me of the broker/exchange/internet failures/problems, but it cannot alert me anything if it is not running at all, therefore it can not alert me when OS reboots or ATS crashing . I will do checks of CPU temperature / hard drive & memory situation , etc. from time to time, as recommended by dcraig, but still I need something in realtime to monitor the OS rebooting unexpectedly or ATS crashing, Is there some software available that will do this monitoring job, just to make sure that the ATS is running properly ?
Google for "process monitor alert" There are tons of programs that you can run to alert if you another process on your system has failed (and even take action like restart it). You may be able to accomplish the same thing with the built-in Performance Monitor tool (found in the Administrative Tools folder) The best way to monitor the OS itself is to run monitoring software on a second PC and use that PC to monitor the first PC, again, tons of software out there that will monitor a remote PC, from a simple "ping" healthcheck to more sophisticated monitoring of CPU, memory, etc using either SNMP or the Windows Performance Monitor API
It was probably a windows update. They sometimes reboot the computer for you (that is reallly annoying.) When you reinstalled XP, you probably did not set automatic updates, so no reboots. The standard way of checking any software is running is by using a "ping/heartbeat". That can be done in as many ways as you can get a program to respond. One easy way is to email you every 5 minutes with a current quote for what it is trading, along with the volume for the day for that instrument. If that is not changing... nitro