Whistle Blower will regularly check your servers and can perform various actions if they fail to respond. Whistle Blower can send e-mail, restart an attached PowerKey, send a page via PageNow!, or launch any AppleScript or other application to customize your response to a server failure. Whistle Blower also has powerful notification shift management features that let you send the e-mail or page to the people on duty when the failure happens.
Main Window:
- All On, All Off, Cancel Current Connections buttons on the main window control all tasks in the window. The "All Off" or the "Cancel Current Connections" buttons can be useful if you have a particular task that you know will fail; say you just saw someone trip over the cord, and you don't have time to scroll through the list to find the correct task to turn off, you can hit the All Off button. There is also a Check All menu item.
- To the left of the buttons will be displayed two status icons (not pictured in the screen shot). The first will show you if Web-based administration is turned on, and will flash when someone actually hits the Web server. The second is the PowerKey icon. If the PowerKey support is turned on in the preferences dialog, then this icon will be displayed. If the icon is not displayed, then no attempt will be made to actually talk to the PowerKey. This mode is good for testing when you don't actually want to switch off your servers.
- Each server task is displayed on the scrolling pane of controls. First, the Active checkbox, followed by the name of the task, followed by the time of the last check and the countdown to the next check. Finally, there's a button to start a check now, or to cancel a check that is in progress. The boundary between the name and the status info can be dragged left and right to re-size the display. Command-drag this line to resize all the tasks together.
- When a task is actively checking a server, it will have a scrolling hash mark behind the text. If an error happens the hash mark color will change to red. If the server fails to respond, the red hash mark will remain displayed. When the server comes back up the hash mark will be cleared, but an alert icon will remain displayed next to the Check Now button to show you that the server had an error but is now online. You can clear the alert by clicking on it, or by selecting "Clear Alert" from the Task Menu.
- You can select a task by clicking once on it. Then you can use the Task Menu to re-arrange the task display, open the task setup window or delete the task. Double-clicking on the task will open it for editing.