Mark Nold's questions

I'm looking at setting up a tool for collecting usage data and KPIs from multiple systems on various platforms. We'd like to regularly report on key indicators on system usage and health. It doesn't need to be real time monitoring just monthly indicators of performance and usage.

The systems that would feed into would be vary from Solaris boxes running large ERP app, to IIS running our intranet. We'll agree on 2-5 kpi's for each, then write some sort of script to extract the data from each system. The data would vary from usage by user name, usage by app, to performance data such as response time from each site.

Is there any off the shelf applications out there for storing and reporting varied metrics?

In my case it needs to be free to cheap, otherwise we'll just create and maintain a small DB ourselves.

I have a business critical application server that was installed some time ago. The installation was an expensive process (large complicated CICS based system on Win2k3) and is something i'd not like to repeat.

However five years have past and i'd like to virtualise the server (using VMWare) so we can secure it and upgrade the hardware.

We have successfully tested virtualising the system but have found that the original Win2k3 OS wasn't installed using our usual volume license but a retail copy. I'm guessing this means every time we move the underlying hardware it'll call for activation and eventually run out. This could be a problem if we have to resort to a backup due to a massive hardware failure.

What i would like to do is change the underlying licensee for the OS without having to reinstall everything. Is this possible for Win2k3? How do you go about it?