Performance monitoring

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:

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:

Notes

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:

  1. Include Performance monitoring as a rule in the alert ruleset for the device.
  2. 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.)
  3. 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
  1. Click Tools > Reporting/Monitoring > Health dashboard.
  2. In list of devices, double-click the device you want to configure.
    The Real-time inventory and monitoring console opens in another browser window.
  3. In the left navigation pane, click Monitoring.
  4. Click the Performance counter settings tab.
  5. From the Objects column, select the object you want to monitor.
  6. From the Instances column, select the instance of the object you want to monitor, if applicable.
  7. 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.

  8. Specify the polling frequency (every n seconds) and the number of days to keep the counter history.
  9. 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.
  10. Specify upper and/or lower thresholds.
  11. Click Apply.
Notes

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
  1. Click Tools > Reporting/Monitoring > Health dashboard.
  2. 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.
  3. In the left navigation pane, click Monitoring.
  4. 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
  1. Click Tools > Reporting/Monitoring > Health dashboard.
  2. 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.
  3. In the left navigation pane, click Monitoring.
  4. Click the Active performance counters tab, if necessary.
  5. 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
  1. On the device (either directly or via remote control) click Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Services.
  2. Double-click LANDesk Message Handler Service.
  3. Under Startup Type, select Manual, and click OK.

You can also click Stop under Service Status.