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Need For Microsoft Windows Monitoring
Microsoft Windows technologies form a core part of most IT infrastructures. While Microsoft Exchange is widely used for enterprise email, the Internet Information Server (IIS) powers a majority of all web servers on the Internet. Microsoft SQL server is a scalable database platform of choice, and the Active Directory server is widely being used to maintain and manage access lists and credentials.
The Microsoft Windows operating system and applications have extensive built-in instrumentation, providing an easy way to extract hundreds of performance statistics. However, analyzing hundreds of metrics manually can be a laborious process that requires in-depth knowledge and expertise. A key challenge in monitoring such infrastructures is in determining, which of the available performance statistics are critical indicators of server and application performance, and how these indicators need to be correlated to deduce where the root-cause of a problem may lie. Fast, accurate problem diagnosis can improve service uptime, improve customer satisfaction, reduce operational costs, and increase the effectiveness of the IT administrators.
The eG Microsoft Windows Monitor
The eG Enterprise suite offers comprehensive monitoring of the Microsoft Windows operating system and applications hosted on it. Pre-defined models of the operating system and individual applications (web server, mail server, database, etc.) incorporated in the eG Enterprise suite dictate what are the key operating system and application metrics that are to be collected in real-time by an eG agent. Each agent compares the metrics it collects against auto-generated or manually configured thresholds, and generates personalized alerts to operators as and when appropriate. Pre-defined hierarchical models for most popular applications, included as part of the eG Enterprise suite, are used to correlate across the collected metrics to differentiate between the cause and effects of a problem (Figure 1).
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| Figure 1 : eG Enterprise's hierarchical model of IT infrastructure components ensures clear problem demarcation |
Salient Features of the eG Microsoft Windows Monitor
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Through a unique combination of agent-based and agentless monitoring capabilities, the eG Enterprise suite allows administrators to choose which of these contrasting monitoring modes is ideal for each of the servers in the infrastructure. |
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eG's flexible agent deployment and licensing model ensures cost-effective monitoring of the target infrastructure. eG's agent licensing is independent of the processing capacity of the system (i.e., a single agent license suffices even for a quad processor system) or the specific IP address of the server. |
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The use of a single agent to monitor the operating system metrics as well as the application metrics ensures that the monitoring is performed with very little overhead on the target systems. |
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For small and medium businesses that commonly deploy multiple applications on the same system (e.g., an IIS web server and a Microsoft SQL server database), a single agent itself is capable of monitoring all of these diverse applications. |
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Since the agents are auto-upgradable, once provisioned, the eG system requires near zero maintenance. |
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By considering business services that include inter-related application and network components, the eG Enterprise suite correlates performance across the infrastructure tiers to identify the root-cause of problems. |
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Through a variety of reporting options that it provides, eG Enterprise assists administrators in understanding the bottlenecks in their infrastructure. Administrators can use eG's operations and snapshot reports to perform post-facto analysis to determine what action(s) could have caused problems in their infrastructure. |
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Figure 2 : A service topology indicating the Microsoft Windows applications
involved in delivering a business service and the inter-dependencies between them |
Platforms Supported by the eG Microsoft Windows Monitor
| Operating Systems |
Microsoft Applications |
Other Applications |
| Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows 2008, Windows 2003, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows NT |
IIS web server, Microsoft Transaction Server, Active Directory, BizTalk Server, File Server, Print Server, Microsoft Terminal Server, Exchange Server, Microsoft Proxy, Microsoft MQ, ASP.NET, DNS, WINS, DHCP, Domain Controller, Event Logs |
Apache web server, Oracle database, Sybase, DB2 UDB, MySQL, WebLogic, WebSphere, Citrix MetaFrame, Lotus Domino, and many others |
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Benefits of Microsoft Windows Server Monitoring using eG Enterprise |
| Simplifies monitoring and management of large Microsoft server farms by providing a single integrated view of the entire infrastructure - from networks, to applications, to end-user services |
| Lowers support costs through clear problem demarcation across operational silos |
| Facilitates remote monitoring and control of servers from anywhere, anytime using a unique 100% web-based architecture |
| Minimizes downtime through auto-correlation and instant root-cause diagnosis |
| Facilitates optimization of existing investments in Microsoft technologies through its data analysis, trending, and reporting capabilities |
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Multi-tier IT infrastructures are a nightmare to troubleshoot because of the dependencies that exist between application tiers. For instance, a failure in the database tier could result in slow downs in the application and web server tiers. Hence, monitoring solutions that view the infrastructure as independent silos cannot effectively monitor and diagnose problems in such infrastructures. The addition of virtualization to such infrastructures makes monitoring and management of these infrastructures even more challenging!
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Fig 1: A problem in one application can affect all the other applications involved in the service delivery. |
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Fig 2: Excessive disk reads by the media server slow down Oracle database accesses |
Since a single VMware® ESX/ESXi Server is used to host multiple virtual machines (VMs), a single malfunctioning application on a VM can degrade the performance seen by applications hosted on the other VMs. Figures 1 and 2 illustrate such an example. In this scenario, users are experiencing slowness in their access to a web-based service. From the service topology, it is clear that the database server is the cause of the slowdown. Figure 2 illustrates that since the database server is hosted on the same ESX/ESXi server as a media server, high I/O activity due to increased access to the media server is resulting in the database server seeing slow disk accesses. To accurately diagnose the problem in this example, a monitoring solution must not only consider the inter-dependencies between applications that are involved in service delivery, but it must also consider the existential relationships between applications, virtual machines, and physical machines. Besides resource contention among guest virtual machines, applications executing on the ESX/ESXi service console can also affect the performance of the virtual infrastructure.
While knowing which VM is consuming excessive resources is helpful, it is even more important to understand whether the VM's behavior is normal. For instance, a memory leak in one of the applications executing inside a VM may be causing the VM's memory usage to increase over time. In such cases, it is essential that the monitoring solution be able to look in-depth into each guest VM and detect abnormalities. While deploying individual agents inside each VM provides this level of visibility, this can result in additional resource overhead, licensing fees, and maintenance cost.
Performance degradations in a virtual infrastructure may also be because a virtual machine has not been configured with sufficient resources to handle its workload. A monitoring solution must be able to differentiate problems resulting from inadequate virtual machine configuration and those resulting from hot-spots created by uneven distribution of load across ESX/ESXi servers. |
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