System admins overlooking Windows server farms or desktops should check out ControlUp, which offers a rich set of management tasks and monitoring capabilities. This article reviews some of the features, which may prove especially useful when identifying and troubleshooting common issues.

Submitted by Yoni Avital

The daily routine of a Windows systems administrator involves a variety of challenges, one of which is common to most mundane procedures, and is undoubtedly familiar to you all. The challenge is to spot and act upon irregularities among multiple machines and user sessions. The emphasis on multiple is due to the fact that many great tools are designed to work on one computer at a time (Task Manager, Registry Editor, Services console to name a few).

ControlUP

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I think most of us who have worked with VMware’s VSphere have to come realize that it’s a great product, but it still leaves us yearning for more robust real-time VM monitoring, documentation, and management reporting for our virtual environments. That is where a product like Veeam ONE Free Edition can be a key player in your environment. It has no restrictions on the number of vCenter servers and ESX(i) host you can mange, and best of all it’s free.

VMware vCenter and ESX(i) monitoring – Veeam ONE Free Edition

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If you’re a Windows administrator who is intrigued by the interoperability of existing web-based monitoring systems but put off by their difficulty of configuration, you’ll have to check out FrameFlow.

Developed to run on Windows, FrameFlow offers out-of-the-box web-based administration and reporting without tedious config files or a hefty price tag. Unlike other Windows monitoring products, FrameFlow does not utilize any client software to perform status checks, supplanting tedious client installation/patching with existing monitoring frameworks like WMI. Administrators are not limited to monitoring only Windows hosts, either: FrameFlow can handle Linux and BSD hosts with relative ease. Let’s take a quick look at the features FrameFlow has to offer.

FrameFlow – Main window

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Power Admin Server Monitor is an easy to use monitoring tool for your Windows infrastructure.

Power Admin raffles off a 500-server PA Server Monitor Ultra license (retails for $5500). The deadline for this contest is May 8, 2012. If you want to have a chance to win this license, please send an email with the subject “PA Server Monitor” to .

In a monitoring space dominated by Linux-oriented offerings like Nagios and Icinga, it’s difficult to find Windows-oriented monitoring products that combine flexibility with ease of configuration. It’s safe to say that Power Admin has a winner in PA Server Monitor, a GUI-based monitoring solution for Windows that allows you to set up a wide array of actions, monitors, hosts, and satellites across your Windows infrastructure.

The PA Server Monitor interface

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In this poll, I'd like to find out what role monitoring plays in your network and the kind of tools you are using.

I don’t want to say much more about this poll at the moment because I somehow think that I influence readers with my introductory articles. I think, the questions speak for themselves. So, be a worthy 4sysops citizen and fulfill your voting obligations.

Note that you can select more than one answer. Feel free to tell us what monitoring solution you are using in a comment below.

In this final part of the eight part technical review of SCOM 2012 we’ll look at the new dashboard functionality and how they can be displayed in different environments, including SharePoint 2010 and we’ll add some final remarks around SCOM 2012.

While monitoring systems like SCOM collects vast amounts of data, it’s not a matter of collecting the data; it’s a matter of filtering and displaying the right data to the right people at the right time.

There are three primary ways of doing this, you can have alerts that tell you that something is wrong and needs attention, reports showing historical data and dashboards that show actionable, real time data in a visual fashion that can be personalised.

Whereas earlier versions of SCOM had Views and simple dashboards, SCOM 2012 takes it to a whole new level. No longer do you need to group objects before creating a view and the new wizard for creating dashboards makes it very easy to display exactly the right information in the right way. There’s no programming necessary to create your own dashboards.

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In this seventh part of the eight part technical review of SCOM 2012 we’ll look at cross platform monitoring of Unix and Linux and some welcome improvements there as well as how the new Java Enterprise Edition (JEE) application server monitoring fits in.

Unix and Linux monitoring in SCOM 2012

Monitoring Unix and Linux (*nix) machines is necessary in larger environments because there’s almost always some *nix servers; even in mostly Windows shops and SCOM 2012 brings some very important improvements. The Unix/Linux monitoring covers HP-UX 11i v2 / v3 on PA-RISC and IA64, Sun Solaris 9 on SPARC as well as 10 on SPARC and x86, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, 5 and 6 on both x86 and x64, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 on x86, 10 SP1 and 11 on both x86 and x64 along with IBM AIX 5.3, 6.1 and 7.1 on POWER.

SSCOM 2102 Linux monitoring

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This third part in our Nagwin series focuses on configuring Nagios contacts and notifications for server status.

What’s better than being able to check on server health status through the Nagios monitoring views? Having Nagios notify you of server health status automatically! If you have ever had a server fail, shut down, or hang—only to learn about it later from disgruntled users—you’ll understand why this feature is so valuable.

Creating and Managing Contacts

Nagios can notify you of certain changes or issues in server configuration that may occur. Sometimes you want different alerts sent to different email addresses. For example, you may want to send alerts about a database server’s health to the DBA, and send all other alerts to the systems administrator. To define a single contact, navigate to your ICW root and go to folder /etc/nagios/nagwin. Open the contacts.cfg file in your favorite text editor. Let’s get started on defining contacts. A contact definition has the following form:

define contact {   
contact_name           systems_admin_1; short name of contact
usegeneric-contact     default contact template
alias                  Johnny Bernard Doe; full name
email                  jdoe@mycompany.com; email address
}

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In this sixth part of the SCOM 2012 review series we’ll deep dive into Application Performance Monitoring (APM), formerly known as AVIcode before Microsoft acquired the technology, how it works as well as differences between the stand-alone product and the integrated version in SCOM 2012.

Troubleshooting application performance issues is a very difficult area, often requiring intimate knowledge of the workings of a particular program. Is the problem in the code, the server hardware, the server software or in the network? Developers need deep insight and detailed logs to debug whereas IT Professionals need standard metrics across all applications and a way to easily pinpoint in which tier the problem might lie.

Microsoft acquired AVIcode in late 2010; this product is designed to look for performance problems in application code without requiring instrumentation to have been built in by the developers. The standalone AVIcode product version 5.7 will be the last as it’s now integrated into SCOM as Application Performance Monitoring (APM).

If you’re a current user of AVIcode 5.7 be aware that its management packs won’t work in SCOM 2012 (templates still work though) ; also APM will only work with .NET / web applications, not stand alone executables and it will only monitor IIS 7 / 7.5 not IIS 6. On the upside the infrastructure is totally integrated in SCOM, there’s no separate database and if it’s monitoring a Server 2008/2008 R2 machine with the IIS management pack the agent will automatically be deployed, although it’s not activated. Another improvement is that you can set an overall SLA for all web applications rather than having to configure monitoring for each individual application, the SLA can then be tweaked for particular programs as needed.

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In this fifth part of the SCOM 2012 RC review series we’ll examine the new Network Monitoring capabilities and the benefits this will bring to IT operations.

Because big organisations often separate the network administration from server operations it can sometimes be difficult to efficiently narrow down if a particular problem is due to the network, the OS, the application or hardware. The new native Network monitoring feature is designed to increase visibility and help IT admins solve problems quicker, it’s not designed to replace specialist network monitoring tools that are probably already part of the network administrator’s toolkit.

Whilst SCOM 2007 R2 offers basic network device monitoring it doesn’t extend to the port level (unless you manually do the work for each individual device based on its Object Identifier (OID)). SCOM 2012 offers support for SNMP 1.0, 2.0 and 3 (but not Netflow) and works with both IPv4 and IPv6. Initial device discovery requires IPv4 addresses on devices so if you have a pure IPv6 network with no IPv4 address allocation this will be an issue. Devices in this context can be switches, routers, load balancers and firewall as well as any other network connectivity gadget that responds to SNMP monitoring.

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In the fourth part of this SCOM 2012 review series we’ll look at the removal of the Root Management Server (RMS), it’s replacement, how to build a Highly Available SCOM infrastructure easily and acquaint ourselves with the new Resource Pool concept.

Root Management Server (RMS) in SCOM 2007

Because of the unique role that the RMS plays in SCOM 2007 R2 it’s a single point of failure. It’s the connection point for consoles / web consoles, it runs the configuration service, it handles connectors and health aggregation as well as role based access control. The way to build High Availability (HA) in SCOM 2007 R2 is to cluster the RMS server which is operationally and technically complex and also relies on an active / passive model with the associated hardware and licensing costs. There’s also the option to manual promote a secondary management server to RMS in a disaster situation but this isn’t straightforward.

SCOM 2012 high availability

SCOM 2012 changes the game by doing what Exchange and other Microsoft applications have already done by providing HA out of the box. Management servers are pooled and automatically share the load, no server is more important than any other and simply by having several of them availability is ensured. Each server runs the configuration service and they store their data in the database instead of in an XML configuration file / memory like SCOM 2007 R2 did (this file could be up to several GB in large environments), leading to quicker start-up of each management server.

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In this third part of the SCOM 2012 RC technical review we’ll look at Interoperability with other management systems and other System Center products, PowerShell v2 and v3 support in SCOM 2012 and Console enhancements.

Interoperability in SCOM 2012

Because a modern enterprise is heterogeneous SCOM sometimes needs to integrate with other monitoring solutions such as IBM Tivoli, HP OpenView and others. In SCOM 2007 R2 this is accomplished with connectors, but these are not supported in SCOM 2012. The integration between SCOM and other management systems will now be accomplished through System Center Orchestrator 2012.

The different programs in the System Center suite are essentially different applications with little integration in the current version. System Center Orchestrator 2012 is about to change this in the 2012 wave by providing Integration Packs (IP) for each of the major Systems Center applications including SCOM. The SCOM IP can create and interact with Alerts and Monitors as well as start and stop maintenance mode.

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In this second part of our eight part rerview of SCOM 2012 we’ll look at how to upgrade from Operations Manager 2007 R2, the sequence, multi-homing agents and management packs considerations.

Upgrading to Operations Manager 2012

Only SCOM 2007 R2 can be upgraded to Operations Manager 2012 so if you’re on an earlier version you have to upgrade to this level first. If you’re an early adopter and trialled the beta it can be upgraded to the current Release Candidate and it in turn is supported for upgrade to RTM. You can’t however upgrade from the beta directly to RTM, nor can you upgrade to RC from a SCOM 2012 beta that was originally upgraded from SCOM 2007 R2.

The most important prerequisite however is that all SCOM 2007 R2 management servers that you want to upgrade are 64 bit on x64 hardware and run 2008 R2 SP1 as the OS. If this isn’t the case in your environment, fear not, you can spin up a new server and start the upgrade from there. If you’re doing your upgrade this way back up your encryption keys from the current RMS and restore them on the new SCOM 2012 server.

The general sequence for an upgrade is: secondary management servers, gateways and agents first, then the Root Management Server (RMS). If any management servers or gateways are still 2007 R2 the final RMS upgrade will be blocked. If agents are still 2007 R2 this will be highlighted during the RMS upgrade but it won’t block the upgrade. Be aware that these agents won’t be able to report to SCOM until they have been upgraded to SCOM 2012 agents.

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In this first part of the SCOM 2012 (Systems Center Operations Manager) overview we’ll cover hardware and software prerequisites, database requirements and enhancements to the installation.

Long gone are the days when monitoring your IT environment meant waiting for the phone to ring and your users tell IT that something wasn’t working. Keeping an eye on your infrastructure is important for businesses of all sizes and Systems Center Operations Manager (SCOM) has been very good at providing that visibility for Microsoft’s platforms for many years, the current version (2007 R2) added native cross platform support for Linux and Unix.

SCOM 2012 – Main Console

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In this article you will be introduced to the free Real-Time Bandwidth Monitor utility from SolarWinds. With this tool you can watch network utilization statistics for multiple interfaces in real time

One of the duties of many Windows systems administrator is network management. That is, you may be called to detect, diagnose, troubleshoot and resolve network interface slowdowns.

As your network grows in complexity to include multiple line-of-business (LOB) Web applications, load-balancing configurations, and the like, interface troubleshooting and performance monitoring can easily become extremely cumbersome and complex.

Monitoring an interface with SolarWinds Real-Time Bandwidth Monitor

To assist us in this effort, SolarWinds gives us the Real-Time Bandwidth Monitor. This is a free utility that enables us to monitor network bandwidth utilization statistics for multiple interfaces in real time.

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