Things I like about my company... the naming parties and the utilities that come from them!
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So, for my group, the hardest part of any new project is coming up with the name. When we're building a web service for integration then it's really easy. It's the tools for our own use that take the most effort.
We wrote a super-simple website for deploying our software. You pick the application to deploy, select the version (this screen shows you which version are available and which have been deployed to each environment), choose any specific nant tasks you want to run if you don't want the default task, and then click the deploy button. It's the beautiful finale to a coordinated effort between anthill, ant and nant. It wraps and manages a nant script, psexec, and robocopy to deploy anything (we're handling a j2ee app to aix, biztalk, c# websites, etc).
The logical name, after a quick team huddle, was the Deployer of Applications, or DOA for short.
We wrote another component that sits in BizTalk and manages routing xml documents based on business rules and such... the UI for the component is ramrod (rules automation manager for the router of documents).
We wrote an appender for log4net that writes to an msmq. We have a listener on the other side that drains the queue and writes everything to a central DB. We can then monitor each environment and, by way of a message tagging mechanism, track each system the message is routed through and what the results were, including any errors. The UI for that tool is called 'elf'. Everyone that's seen us using the tool has subsequently asked for a copy.. .dba's, systems analyst, and qa are all using the tool to troubleshoot the particular areas they're interested in... it's saved us a ton of time on support.
I'm now spending a few hours on an operational dashboard that provides visibility to what's happening at a detailed level inside our external integration hub. People are most likely to use this tool when things aren't going right. The candidate names were:
Crashboard
Dude, where's my data?
Where's the File?
some less funny ones....
Where's the File handily won. The biggest feature request so far has been to generate a daily email of activity just so people can get the Daily WTF.
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Call it FILE_NOT_FOUND-handler ;-)
Or, since you're dealing with with mistakes at a very small level, call it Pedant.
