This article describes how to configure SLCheck to perform a user defined action not at the first, but at the second occurrence of a timeout. We assume that there is a scheduled task that performs SLCheck commands in regular intervals, e.g. once a minute.

SLCheck -a ftp-server -p 21 -r "220" -d FTP -SLFile FTP\FTP.csv

"-d FTP" indicates that we use the .cmd files from subdirectory c:\SLCheck\FTP. We have to copy them to that location manually and modify them like described later. "-SLFile FTP\FTP.csv" tells SLCheck to log all results to c:\SLCheck\FTP\FTP.csv.

SLCheck has no brain. That means that a SLCheck command doesn't know anything about the result of the previous command. So we have to create that brain in the form of a file flag. We would like to monitor a FTP server. If the request to the FTP server times out, we create an empty "flag file" that indicates that a timeout has happened. This is our CheckTimeout.cmd file:

if exist FTP-Timeout.flag (
  blat.exe ... "FTP server not running..." 
  )
else echo "..." >FTP-Timeout.flag 
 
blat.exe is our mail notifier. The echo command creates a file named FTP-Timeout.flag.

Here is the CheckOK.cmd file. It should delete our flag file if it exists:

if exist FTP-Timeout.flag del FTP-Timeout.flag

Maybe the FTP-Timeout.flag file is located in a path you don't want, e.g. in the system32 folder. You can specify the full path name in that case (c:\SLCheck\...).

With these batch commands we have achieved that SLCheck works in a generous mode. The first occurrence of a timeout will be ignored. If there are two consecutive timeouts, the alarm notification will be sent.