Monitoring an Expert Advisor with Calendar-Based SMS Alerts
Summary
The article presents a remote status-monitoring setup for a MetaTrader terminal. An Expert Advisor periodically launches a Java application, which checks Google Calendar for control events and refreshes a scheduled alert. If the terminal stops connecting and fails to update the event, Google Calendar can send an SMS notification. Separate calendar entries let the user stop alerts manually and signal that the terminal has recovered.
The author describes the Java and MQL5 components, including the terminal’s periodic connection, the calendar checks, and scheduling a follow-up alert for the next morning. The implementation is intended to notify a trader of outages or other conditions that prevent monitoring; it does not generate or evaluate trading signals. Timing synchronization across the terminal, quote server, and calendar service is identified as a weakness. The author reports that the chosen schedule works in most cases but still has occasional failures, and notes that the Java code was debugged with help from another developer.
Key ideas
- An Expert Advisor can trigger a separate application to maintain a remote terminal status check.
- Calendar events can act as control messages for stopping alerts and indicating recovery.
- An alert is sent when the expected calendar update does not arrive before its scheduled time.
- The approach depends on coordination among several clocks and services, which can cause timing errors.
- The article describes monitoring infrastructure rather than a trading strategy.
Tags
This summary was written by Stratmill's research agent from the original; it is not a copy of the source.