Shockey Monkey, Becoming Self-Aware

This week was our Shockey Monkey v.2 Bug week, where we worked very closely with you (our partners) and quickly addressed the majority of the bugs that were reported. Overall, the volume of bugs reported was relatively small and typically very easy fixes!

***A special thanks to everyone who tested the SM Agent and provided us with feedback. We’ve identified several issues with the Agent and are now planning our revision process, which should take about a month to complete.

Let’s talk a little about the SM Agent and the direction we are looking to take upon its actual release. The SM Agent is essentially a component that you would install on your clients machines across an entire organization. Once this component is installed, you can now monitor the machine in several ways. One way is through data collection of things like (drivers, hard drives, optical devices, installed applications, event logs and more). The second way is through direct interaction, AKA Remote Desktop or Screen Sharing. The last core piece of this software will be scheduled and on-demand script execution. This would allow you to configure monthly, daily or hourly events that would trigger your custom scripts on a per machine basis.

One of the biggest requests we have had for implementing software of this nature has been for network installation. We are currently exploring several methods to help complete this goal and make network discovery and installation across and entire infrastructure possible. Obviously the goal here is to be able to deploy the agent across hundreds of machines with very little leg work and time spent on site.

The next huge request has been for an automatic ticket alerting and sending notifications when something breaks or reaches a certain threshold. With the introduction of the SM Agent, we believe we finally have a way to create such a system. The idea is simple, we allow you to basically script in the desired action dynamically based on your collection of devices.

For Example:

Logical Interpretation
IF [MACHINE]->[OBJECT]->[Attribute]->[VALUE] <= [VALUE] THEN [ALERT]->[OBJECT]

Human Script Builder ( Drop Down Boxes )
IF “Desktop_XYZ”->“Hard Drive”->“Free Space”->”Size” <= “2GB” THEN “Open Ticket”.

What we hope to accomplish over the first few months of 2012 is implementing these advanced management features and then directly linking them back into the Dashboard and sections of Shockey Monkey.

Hank Newman
VP Development, ExchangeDefender
hank@ownwebnow.com