Introduction

Argus Health is a combination of a

• Health.Service: a background service that executes GET requests on configurable HTTP endpoints to verify the health of an application, typically a REST API.
• Argus.Pulse: a desktop app that visualizes the health of EndPoints and that provides funnctionality to create, update and delete endpoints.

Code Quality

Build Status

GitHub actions are used to build and test the Argus Health application

Branch	Build Status
Master
Development

Building the Installer

The MSI installer packages both the Argus Health Service and Argus Health Pulse into a single installer. It requires PowerShell and the .NET SDK.

pwsh .\build-installer.ps1

The script publishes both projects as self-contained win-x64 applications and builds the WiX v5 installer. The output MSI is located at:

Argus.Health.Installer\bin\Release\Argus.Health.Installer.msi

The installed service

The MSI installs the Windows service Argus Health Service, which starts automatically and runs as NT AUTHORITY\LocalService: an account without administrative rights on the machine that presents anonymous credentials on the network. A health endpoint that requires Windows authentication can therefore not be checked.

When the process of the service ends unexpectedly, Windows restarts it after 60 seconds; the failure count is reset after a day. The service ends with exit code 1 when one of its background services fails, so that this restart also happens then.

The database and the log files of the service are in the profile of that account, which only the account itself and administrators can read:

C:\Windows\ServiceProfiles\LocalService\AppData\Local\ArgusHealthService

Warnings and errors are also written to the Application event log, with the source Argus.Health.Service.

Upgrading from version 1.0.0

Version 1.0.0 ran the service as LocalSystem and kept its data in C:\Windows\System32\config\systemprofile\AppData\Local\ArgusHealthService. The installer does not move that data. To keep the configured endpoints and their history, stop the service after the upgrade, copy ArgusHealth.sqlite from the old folder to the new one from an elevated prompt, and start the service again:

Stop-Service "Argus Health Service"
Copy-Item "C:\Windows\System32\config\systemprofile\AppData\Local\ArgusHealthService\ArgusHealth.sqlite" `
          "C:\Windows\ServiceProfiles\LocalService\AppData\Local\ArgusHealthService\" -Force
Start-Service "Argus Health Service"

Releasing a New Version

Use the version bump script to update all project files in one step:

pwsh .\bump-version.ps1 -Version 0.2.0

This updates the <Version> element in both .csproj files and the Version attribute in Package.wxs. Then:

git diff                                              # review changes
git add -A && git commit -m "[Release] v0.2.0"        # commit
git tag v0.2.0                                        # tag
pwsh .\build-installer.ps1                            # build the MSI