Sometimes Weak but Intelligent Feedback is Just What’s Needed

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I was monitoring one of my price injectors this morning and several weeks ago I had worked up an interesting little addition to monitor the app that's processing the prices I'm injecting. I worked up the log-based monitoring, and at the time I was a little concerned that it was too loosely coupled, and that we'd get into trouble because of this. Because of this, I worked very hard to try and anticipate a lot of the conditions that might occur, and as of this morning, I'm very glad to say the efforts have certainly paid off.

Sometimes, it's good to be loosely coupled. I had no real choice, but even if I had, this was a vendor's closed package and what was I really going to do? I have done pretty much all I can. In this case, it was really thinking about what might happen that did the trick. I can see that my app detects that their app is frozen and simply stops sending. I can see it detect that the app has been restarted and starts sending again. Little things, I know, but it's going to make it possible to have my app proactively restart theirs.

That would be a great kick in the pants, wouldn't it? "Hey guys... your app freezes on me -- a lot, so I put in code to detect it and restart it. You might want to work on that stability someday." Man, that would be s...w...e...e...t.

It's just what the doctor ordered.