Management Suite
provides several methods for monitoring a device's health status.
While alert rulesets are defined at the core console and deployed
to multiple devices, on individual devices you can also define
performance monitoring counters to monitor specific performance
issues.
You can define performance counters and monitor them for various
kinds of data on your devices, such as:
Hardware components (such as drives, processors, and
memory)
Hardware sensors (such as fans, voltages, and
temperatures)
OS components (such as processes and services)
Application components (such as bytes per second
transferred by the system's Web server)
Usage levels
When you select a performance counter you also specify the
frequency for polling the item, as well as specify the performance
thresholds and number of violations that are allowed before an
alert is generated. After you define a performance counter,
you can then open the Monitoring page in the Real-time
inventory and monitoring console and view a summary of your
monitored alerts.
In order to be alerted for performance monitor items on a
device, you must include a Performance monitor rule in the ruleset
for that device. See Using alerts
for details about defining and applying rulesets.
This section includes information about defining performance
monitor rulesets on your managed devices:
Communications to the monitoring agent are via HTTP
over TCP/IP in the form of GET or POST requests. Responses to
requests are in XML documents.
When you run and store a query on the health status
of devices (Computer.Health.State), the state in the database is
represented by a number. The numbers correspond to the following
states: 4=Critical, 3=Warning, 2=Normal, 1=Informational, null or
0=unknown.
Hardware monitoring is dependent on the capabilities
of the hardware installed on a device, as well as on the correct
configuration of the hardware. For example, if a hard drive with
S.M.A.R.T. monitoring capabilities is installed on a device but
S.M.A.R.T. detection is not enabled in the device's BIOS settings,
or if the device's BIOS does not support S.M.A.R.T. drives,
monitoring data will not be available.
If reporting from a specific machine appears to have
stopped, you can use restartmon.exe in the LDCLIENT folder to
restart the collector and all monitoring providers. This utility is
for machines on which reporting has been installed, and reporting
has stopped. Use this utility to restart the collector and
providers without having to reboot the device.
Installing a monitoring agent on
devices
Management Suite
provides an immediate summary of a device's health when the
monitoring agent is installed on the device. The monitoring agent
is one of six agents that can be installed on managed devices. It
checks the device's hardware and configuration on a regular,
periodic basis and reflects any changes in the device's health
status. This is shown by the status icon in the My devices
list, and details are displayed in log entries (shown in the
System information summary) for the device and in graphs
(shown in the Monitoring summary page for the device).
For example, a monitored device with a disk drive that is
filling up can display a warning status icon when the disk is 90%
full, changing to a critical status icon when the disk is 95% full.
You may also receive alerts for the same disk drive status if the
device has an alert ruleset that includes performance monitoring
rules for a drive space alert.
Creating performance monitoring rules
You can choose what performance items are monitored on a device
by defining monitoring rules that specify what the monitoring agent
checks on the device. To do this you need to deploy a ruleset to
the device that includes a Performance monitoring alert rule.
There are a large number of performance counters that can be
monitored. When you create a performance monitor rule you can turn
any of these items on or off, specify how frequently to check them,
and, for some items, set performance thresholds. You can also
select services running on the devices that you want to
monitor.
The overall process for creating performance monitoring rules is
as follows:
Include Performance monitoring as a rule in the alert
ruleset for the device.
Deploy the alert ruleset to the device. (You can
target multiple devices to deploy the ruleset to multiple devices,
but then need to define performance monitoring on individual
devices.)
Create performance monitoring rules on the device
using the Real-time inventory and monitoring console. Some events
such as services also require that you select each service you want
monitored (see detailed steps below).
To select a performance counter to monitor
Click Tools > Reporting/Monitoring
> Health dashboard.
In list of devices, double-click the device you want
to configure.
The Real-time inventory and monitoring console opens in another
browser window.
In the left navigation pane, click
Monitoring.
Click the Performance counter settings
tab.
From the Objects column, select the object you
want to monitor.
From the Instances column, select the instance
of the object you want to monitor, if applicable.
From the Counters column, select the specific
counter you want to monitor.
If the counter you want doesn't appear in the list, click
Reload counters to refresh the list with any new objects,
instances, or counters.
Specify the polling frequency (every n
seconds) and the number of days to keep the counter
history.
In the Alert after counter is out of range
box, specify the number of times the counter will be allowed to
cross the thresholds before an alert is generated.
Specify upper and/or lower thresholds.
Click Apply.
Notes
Performance log files can quickly grow in size;
polling a single counter at a two-second interval adds 2.5 MB of
information to the performance log daily.
A warning alert is generated when a performance
counter drops below a lower threshold on either a Windows or a
Linux device. When a performance counter exceeds an upper threshold
on a Linux device, a warning alert is generated. When a performance
counter exceeds an upper threshold on a Windows device, a critical
alert is generated.
When setting thresholds, bear in mind that alerts
will be generated regardless of whether an upper or lower threshold
is crossed. In the case of something like disk space, you may want
to be alerted only if the device is running low. In this case, you
would want to set the upper threshold to a high enough number that
you would not be alerted if a lot of disk space became available on
the device.
Changing the Alert after counter is out of
range number lets you focus on an issue when it is a persistent
problem or when it is an isolated event. For example, if you are
monitoring the bytes sent from a Web server, Management Suite can alert you when
the bytes/sec consistently runs high. Or, you can specify a low
number such as 1 or 2 to receive an alert whenever your anonymous
FTP connections exceed a certain number of users.
When you edit services in a monitoring rule, the
Available services list displays known services from the
inventory database. No services are displayed in the Available
services list box until a LANDesk agent has been deployed to
one or more devices and an inventory scan is returned to the core.
For example, to select any Linux services from the list, you must
have first deployed an agent to a Linux device.
As part of the deployment process, an XML page is
created that lists the deployed ruleset and devices the ruleset was
deployed to. This report is saved on the core server in the Ldlogon
directory, and is named with a sequential number assigned by the
database. If you want to view this XML page separately from
deploying a ruleset, click the Generate XML button and then
click the link to view the XML file. Generating a ruleset as XML
also allows it to be displayed in the list of available rulesets in
the Agent configuration settings.
Viewing performance monitoring data
The Monitoring page lets you monitor the performance of
various system objects. You can monitor specific hardware
components, such as drives, processors, and memory, or you can
monitor OS components, such as processes or bytes per second
transferred by the system's Web server.
In order to monitor a performance counter you must first select
the counter, which adds it to the list of monitored counters. When
you do this you also specify the frequency for polling the item and
set performance thresholds and the number of violations that are
allowed before an alert is generated.
To view monitored performance counters
Click Tools > Reporting/Monitoring
> Health dashboard.
In the list of devices, double-click the device you
want to configure.
The Real-time inventory and monitoring console opens in another
browser window.
In the left navigation pane, click
Monitoring.
Click the Active performance counters tab, if
necessary.
Monitored counters are listed with columns for how often they
are checked, the number of times the counter is out of range for an
alert to be sent, and the upper and lower threshold settings.
To stop monitoring a performance counter
Click Tools > Reporting/Monitoring
> Health dashboard.
In the list of devices, double-click the device you
want to configure. The Real-time inventory and monitoring console
opens in another browser window.
In the left navigation pane, click
Monitoring.
Click the Active performance counters tab, if
necessary.
Under Monitored performance counters,
right-click the counter and click Delete.
Turning off the ModemView service
The ModemView service is the service/driver that monitors modem
calls (both incoming and outgoing) and generates an alert if it
sees one. This service uses about 10 Mb of memory because it uses
MFC. You may not want it to be running, especially if you don't
have a modem on the device.
To turn the ModemView service off
On the device (either directly or via remote control)
click Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools >
Services.