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Mike McClelland
Asked: 2009-06-07 23:58:04 +0800 CST

Real time monitoring of MS Windows servers and their services

  • 772

We have a bunch of large HDTVs in our monitoring office keeping an eye on all of our production equipment.

We are monitoring:

Cisco routers

  • HP switches
  • HP proliant servers
  • Windows 2003
  • IIS
  • SQL server

At the moment we use

  • Nagios for uptime/availability and alert sending
  • Cacti for bandwidth usage
  • Perfmon running on Vista for server performance
  • A combination of other tools and our own custom code to monitor our actual application performance.

All of this is fine apart from the Perfmon part - it gives us what we want - i.e. real time charts on the screen, logging certain performance counters, etc - the only problem is setting it up is a real chore. If the Vista PC running Perfmon is rebooted (normally due to Windows Update) then setting all the counters up again takes ages - literally an hour or two's worth of work for somebody in the office...

Anybody know of a way to either: 1. Script adding Perfmon counters 2. Another tool with graphical output and WMI/windows counter access.

Thanks

  • Mike
windows performance monitoring perfmon performance-monitoring

16 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I would seperate out the charting/display from the montioring/alerting piece. You haven't said how many object you have. For most shops I'd write a powershell script to get the counters I want and pipe the output to powergadgets and for small shops use polymon to monitor the windows stuff and groundwork to monitor the rest. In a larger environment (30+ servers) I'd take a look at System Center Operations Manager for monitoring and alerting. You have to realize howver that SCOM is NOT just monitoring. It's designed to correct problems and ensure business service, unlike most monitoring software that only cares about server counters. Other options would be tivoli or openview.

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  2. I highly recommend Zabbix to system administrators looking for monitoring and graphing solutions.

    Zabbix has clients (agents) for Windows and Linux systems. They can also read SNMP packets to graph and monitor stats from just about anything.

    I've been using it for 3 years and it has been (relatively) very easy to manage and keep updated.

    They even have application monitoring if you are willing to script the actions for it.

    Zabbix
    (source: zabbix.com)

    Let me know if you have any specific questions about usage.

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  3. if not realtime charts [ that is with few minutes sampling time ] are ok for you - take a look at Munin Node for Windows. alternatively you can probably fetch plenty of statistics from windows via snmp but i've tried it long time ago and abandoned idea quite quickly. munin-node was just enough.

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  4. "Another tool with graphical output and WMI/windows counter access..."

    PolyMon has a good general dashboard display, results are in db for long term trending/reporting. WMI, Perfmon, SNMP, Ping, TCP Port, Powershell....

    For extremely configurable real-time display, (all the same data sources) a variant of the same product is PolyMonRT

    I love em.

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  5. Perfmon can be scripted, and the settings can be saved in Vista. Perfmon can even logged to a MSSQL database. Here's how to do it.

    1. Setup a database server
    2. Create an ODBC connection on the system which you are running perfmon
    3. Create a new perfmon counter and direct it towards the ODBC connection
    4. Startup perfmon, and watch it log

    PROTIP: You can setup your single vista machine to also remotely log perfmon data from other systems.

    And here's how you can generate a report or two from the data you've collected.

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  6. OpenNMS 1.7.x has WMI support. OpenNMS

    Otherwise I would go the Nagios/RRD route as joseph suggested.

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  7. Samurize is great for designing visual realtime perfmon displays. You design everything in an editor, including graphics and overlays. It can run as a widget on the desktop or in the background, generating image files periodically.

    • 1

  8. Admin Arsenal has a great perfmon monitor with graphical charting. It's free to try.

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  9. It is understandable that the setup of 4 different monitoring tools can be quite a lot of work. Since you are already using nagios (the best opensource monitoring tool ever) I would consider integrating all the functionality for your monitoring in the same place (NAGIOS). I have used nagios to monitor all elements you have in your system (sql server, network devices, windows machines...) and more (linux servers, solaris servers, java applications, etc). My recommendation for you is the following: 

    * Cisco routers, HP switches, HP prolient servers: Use check_snmp_int and check_snmp in nagios (you get exactly the same information cacti uses), then install pnp4nagios in your nagios server (that gives you the nice graphs, not just for snmp data but for everything else) 
* Windows 2003, IIS, SQL Server: Install NSClient++ on your windows machines (nagios client for windows), then you can to access all performance counters, WMI objects and more from nagios. Pnp4nagios takes then care of the graphs.

    Good Luck

    //Marco

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  10. After you have added all the counters you can save the resulting config as an msc file. Then just open the .msc to reopen the monitor.

    JR

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