SuperWatchdog Tutorial

Welcome to SuperWatchdog!

SuperWatchdog is a full-featured event-action scheduler designed for scheduling all applications. It is entirely written in Java. It is platform neutral.

See SuperWatchdog Overview about general information.

By the way, you can press the F1 key to access context sensitive help system from any window throughout the whole program. 

SuperWatchdog is the twin software of SuperScheduler. SuperWatchdog shares many things with SuperScheduler.

Now, let's start our tutorial for SuperWatchdog.

1. Go to the main menu. Click on Module > SuperWatchdog > Watchdog Doer to open the Watchdog Doer Panel.

2. The Watchdog (Doer) Panel appears. This panel automatically refreshes itself promptly. The Refresh button is for your convenience only.

We get here by clicking the Watchdog Doer button. So the mode of SuperWatchdog is Doer. It shows on the title of the panel. To make our tutorial simple, we do not discuss Watchdog mode here.

Let's click on the Add button.

3. The Task Panel appears. Let's type "MyTask" (do not use space character) into the Name field and click on the Set Job button.

4. The Set Job Panel appears. Let's click on the Test job type and click the Ok button.

SuperWatchdog uses the same facility to set jobs with SuperScheduler. There is a side tour Set Job Tour introducing detail steps for setting jobs. You can take the side tour at the end of this tutorial. We will remind you.

5. Now, we come back to the Task Panel. We can see there is a brief information about the selected job on the Job field.

6. Let's click on the Set Trigger button to open the Set Trigger Panel.

Let us set the trigger. Highlight File timestamp on Type, then click on the Define button. The File Timestamp Trigger Panel appears:

Key in triggerFile on File name. This task will watch a file named triggerFile. Then click on the Ok button to close this panel.

Note: If the file grows slowly, you need to teach SuperWatchdog how to detect the ripeness of the file. Ripeness criteria is for that. If in a period of time the file does not grow,  we assume the file is mature. If a file is FTPed to a directory and it takes about 10 minutes to finish the job, you probably want to enter a little more than 600 seconds (10 minutes) here. For small files, any value would be good enough. So we just leave 5 second here and go ahead.

7. Now we come back to the Set Trigger Panel again. We see that the Trigger field contains brief information about the trigger. That is what we have specified.

Let's click on the Ok button to close the Set Trigger Panel and come back to the Task Panel. We see that the Trigger field contains brief information about the trigger now.

Do not forget to specify Alarm Email. If anything goes wrong with this task, a notification email will be send to this email address, such as task error or task exceeding expected duration.

Let's click on the Ok button and go back to the Watchgod Doer Panel.

8. Now, we have one line on the Organizer. That is the summary of our new added task.

On the Organizer: Because this is a new task, there is no content on the Last run time. If there is any change on the file triggerFile, the task will run.

On the Activity: It shows the brief information for each working task. Let us manually create a file named triggerFile under the current directory (Acelet-Scheduler home - installed directory, default is acelet-scheduler). You will see that there is a new line shows the brief information for "MyTask".  

9. Let's update the triggFile a couple times. There will be a line on the Activity for each time the timestamp of the file changed. Both the organizer and activity panels of  the Watchdog Panel show dynamic information about all tasks. The information automatically refreshes itself promptly.  You can also use the Refresh button manually refresh it. 

10. You can see working task activity in graphic mode from the Chart Panel.  Click the Chart tab on the Activity. It shows start time of all the executed tasks and gives you a whole picture about the working tasks. Put the mouse on a mark for a second, the related time will show on the chart as an information tip. 

11. You can see task historical information. It is very similar with SuperScheduler. Please see SuperScheduler Tutorial for more information.

12. All the SuperWatchdog related information is stored in the task database. SuperWatchdog shares the same database with SuperScheduler. Please see SuperScheduler Tutorial for more information.

13. SuperWatchdog uses the same facility to set jobs with SuperScheduler. There is a side tour Set Job Tour introducing detail steps for setting jobs. If you have not take that tour, it is time to do so.  

This is our SuperWatchdog tutorial. You can get more information from SuperWatchdog.