Sneaky Use for SCOM #304 – Online Contests
Every now and then you’ll run into them – the ubiquitous online contest. And maybe you run into one that isn’t a scam, and put on by some big name companies – Marlboro, Microsoft, AMD, Best Buy – companies that you think ‘Hey, I probably have a good chance of actually receiving the item’.
Marlboro has one going on right now called “Flavor Chase“. They’re giving away one prize per minute from June 1st until July 31st. The prizes range from the low end (Mini Maglites ((217 given away per day)) ), to the middle area (Logitech Pure-Fi Anywhere iPod Speakers1 ), to the high end (46″ Sony Bravia XBR LCD TV2, Dell XPS m1530 laptop3, Washburn acoustic guitar4 and whole lot more in between. At the end of it all, they have 3 grand prizes – a Harley Davidson Night Rod Special, Dodge Challenger SRT8 or a Jeep Wrangler Rubicon.
You can enter once per day – and they’ll happily send you text messages and emails to remind you. That’s all fine and well – but what if you aren’t by your PC or phone for the day or even just plain forget?
SCOM can help.
How? It’s easy – SCOM has a management pack template called “Web Applications”. It is essentially a synthetic transaction recorder. Like it sounds, it will loop through a set of actions you do at timed intervals – specifically to gather performance information, but you can also use it to enter for you. Give it a shot!
It’s a fairly easy thing to setup, too. Go to Authoring, right click on Management Pack Templates, then click on “Add Monitoring WIzard”.
Now I’ll be writing this tutorial not using the Marlboro contest website. I’m in the contest, and just to be on the safe side I’ll do it the old fashioned way. Instead, I’ll setup a synthetic transaction that will go through a few google searches.
