16 May 08 ToolBox Series Cliff Notes – Windows Child Server and WMI Configuration

Quick Intro – The ToolBox Series are technical 30 minute live webcasts held monthly pertaining to best practices and implementation techniques that GroundWork Monitor customers participate in. All sessions are recorded and archived for future reference. Find out more information about the ToolBox Series here.

Thanks to the participants such as SAIC, Unisys, and the Association of American Medical Colleges and Thomas Stocking, co-founder of GroundWork Open Source for a successful session on May 16. Here are the webcast cliff notes:

Windows Child Server and WMI Configuration
GroundWork Monitor has several ways to monitor a Windows environment that includes active and passive agent based monitoring; and agentless monitoring which gives a complete performance diagnostic. Agent-based monitoring can be accomplished by GroundWork Distributed Monitoring Agents (GDMA) or by 3 different active check methodologies. Agentless monitoring is accomplished by either the Windows Child Server (WCS), the Windows Proxy or by GroundWork Monitor itself.

The advantages of agent-based monitoring is that it’s simple and quite extensible. If your company utilizes passive agent monitoring, it is extremely scalable up to thousands of devices. However agent-based monitoring requires installing something foreign in the Windows environment, and may affect the targets performance.

The advantages of agentless monitoring accomplished by WCS is that it utilizes the native WMI extensions – following a distributed polling methodology. It also increases the capacity of GroundWork Monitor Enterprise because it’s the WCS is pulling the configuration information from Enterprise and pushing monitoring data to Enterprise.

1. How does WCS scale?
We have deployed WCS to monitor 500 devices per each server, and it’s possible to monitor much more based on your configuration. Because it leverages a distributed model, companies can have several WCS servers in their Enterprise deployment and monitor thousands of Windows environments.

2. Is WMI monitoring really limited to CPU RAM and DISK? How to get other counters (i.e. exchange, SQL, AD, DNS, IIS, etc)?
The WMI model itself does monitor those three components, however there are additional monitoring plugins included that monitor virtual any WMI counter including user defined counters.

3. What protocols are used for communication between GroundWork Monitor Enterprise and WCS and WCS to the target?
WCS obtains it’s configuration via the SSH protocol with the Enterprise server. Monitoring data such as service and host availability and performance information is sent from the WCS to Enterprise using the NFCA protocol. The WCS obtains the monitoring data from the targets via WMI.