Admin Arsenal – hardware and software inventory, monitoring, and performance counters

In my last article I introduced Admin Arsenal, Brisworks’ system management tool for small and mid-sized businesses. Today I will describe its components, i.e., hardware and software inventory, software deployment, and monitoring, in detail.

Admin Arsenal organizes computer objects in collections. There are two types of collections, static and dynamic. A static collection is populated manually, i.e., you can just drag computer objects to the corresponding folder. A dynamic collection is based on criteria you configure and is populated automatically whenever you access its folder. Criteria can be combined and use almost any hardware or software property. For example, you can configure a collection that contains all Windows XP SP3 machines using a shared printer. Collections can be organized in folders and subfolders, allowing you to create a hierarchy of computer property-based containers.

These computer properties are added to the inventory database once Admin Arsenal has scanned the computers it discovers in Active Directory. The corresponding scanning process takes only a few minutes and is updated once each day by default.

Admin Arsenal uses the following categories for its inventory: computer properties (manufacturer & model, serial number, boot time, etc.), connectivity with the computer, environmental variables, information on disk drives, information on attached displays, shared directories, printers (device ID, description, driver, port, sharing, and location), NICs (MAC address, manufacturer, windows connection name, and status), local users and groups, running processes, installed services, installed devices, installed software, and monitors.

“Monitors” in this context are not computer displays, but processes that run in the background watching for certain events. There are five types of monitors: event log entries, heartbeats (online/offline status of a computer), performance counters, processes (to be started and stopped), and services (to be started and stopped).

Monitors are defined by an administrator and can be applied to one or multiple computers. You may select the computers manually or apply a monitor to a collection. For each monitor you can configure multiple actions that are triggered if the monitoring condition is met.

For example, it is possible to create a monitor that watches the Terminal Services service on all servers, and restart the service whenever it is down. Possible actions are running a command; sending an e-mail or popup message; creating an event log entry; rebooting the computer; and starting, stopping, or pausing a service. Note that monitors are active only when Admin Arsenal is running.

Performance counters can be used in monitors and you also can chart remote machines’ counters. These are the same counters you see in the Windows Performance Monitor. Admin Arsenal enables you to combine multiple counters in a performance counter set. You can apply counter sets to a single computer in order to display the corresponding charts. This allows you to view multiple performance counters of a remote machine with just a mouse click.

There are two ways of accessing inventory data: for each computer separately, or through reports. A double click on a computer in the Admin Arsenal’s console will open its properties, where you will find many kinds of information about this computer. Some data, such as the running processes or services, will be updated when you click on the corresponding tab. The only data you won’t find here are the performance counters, because they are managed in a separate user interface.

Reports tell you how many computers have a certain property. For example, you can find out how many machines have a certain application installed or to how many computers you applied a particular monitor. You can run reports for all machines in your domain or for a specific collection. There are reports for software, hardware, operating systems, services, and monitors. Some of these reports have subcategories. For instance, there are software reports for applications, publishers, and version numbers. It is also possible to generate software reports per application and per computer.

My next post will cover Admin Arsenal’s software deployment and remote management capabilities.

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