The Win32::PerfLib module is a glorious way to extract performance data from Windows boxen. Check out this site for more information. We used perl 5.6.1. Here is a script that shows how to use this module: use Win32::PerfLib; $processor = 238; $proctime = 6; while (6 ne 9){ if(my $perflib = new Win32::PerfLib(‘srv-48’)){ $proc_ref0 = […]
Monitoring Windows CPU Performance With Perl
Monitoring Servers With GKrellM
GKrellM is a GPL’d multi-platform monitoring program. For a Windows port, see Bill’s Software. In this article we will get GKrellM running on 5 different systems and use client/server mode to connect via SSH, and monitor the systems from a centralized console. We are quite excited about this project because it is client/server (now), has […]
Troubleshooting Slowness/Lockups Over a WAN or VPN
One problem with network monitoring is that latency and router performance do not tell the whole story. What you really want to know is if you can transfer data at the application level across the WAN/VPN. This is particularly useful if you are skimping on your connection to your remote offices by using DSL or […]
Grabbing Top Stats Remotely
One particularly useful tool for systems administration is top. One thing you may not be aware of, is that you can output the information top provides to a file. You may also not know that you can run commands like this remotely via ssh. Here is a short script that demonstrates this: #!/bin/sh /usr/bin/ssh user@domain.com […]
AreWeDown TCP Latency Tester
There is a service we wrote available at AreWeDown.com that will measure the network health of TCP connections. It does this by issuing two insert commands via a MySQL ODBC connection from a system service at 30 second intervals. The idea is that this can be loaded on XP workstations at client sites on the […]
Using Composite To Create Status Wallpaper
We have written several articles on pulling stats from various locations and integrating them. Well, Agatha has been busy, and finally got her desktop integrated. Here is a snapshot of Agatha’s desktop using these techniques: Click for a larger image The trick to creating this desktop is to use gozer to create images from the […]
Creating Log Archives on Windows 2000
We have a process that creates a log file, and we want to archive the log files every day. The easiest way to rotate these logs is to create a batch file that copies the log file to a filename that includes the date of the file as the file name. Now, we can’t really […]
Monitoring a Bunch of Servers in Windows Performance Monitor
We recently had to monitor a farm of Windows servers with Performance Monitor. True, we could add one counter at a time from the various servers… point, click, wait, pulldown, click, ok, click…. aaarghhh. Burning hot pokers in the brain working on these boxes. Now, it turns out that you can edit the log settings […]
Installing SNMP on Windows Server 2003 Using Net-SNMP
Net-SNMP is an open source SNMP project that is released under a BSD license. Installing SNMP will allow you to further Monitor your Servers or Network devices via a Centralized software or management console as well as monitoring bandwidth usage and utilization. To install on Windows Server, grab the .exe from here. Simply run the […]
Logging Performance Monitor Counters to SQL Server – Part 4
There are 4 parts to this article: Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 After you close out the settings, the counter log should be started. If not, then start it: Add the counters from the database by clicking on the log icon from System Monitor and selecting the database via […]
Configuring SNMPv3 Security On Windows Server 2003
In this article we set up SNMP using the Net-SNMP package. We showed how to set up user security for GNU/Linux on our Centos 4 box in this article. The procedure is a little different for Windows, because the net-snmp-config command is not available. The userid and passphrase need to be in the snmpd.conf file: […]
Lua Monitoring Script
Here is a Lua script we put together that measures the latency of a web host, the time to resolve the host, and the time to retrieve a page: — time to resolve host, time to ping host, time to get host/page print (“\”page name\”,\”host latency ms\”,\”dns resolve ms\”,\”page receive ms\””) — fromCSV from http://www.lua.org/pil/20.4.html […]
Live Graph of Apache Processes – Part 1 – Introduction
There are 3 parts to this article: Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 One benchmark that we are interested in while monitoring Apache on GNU/Linux is the number of httpd processes running. Here is an example graph of the number of httpd processes running that is created by the scripts in this article: […]
Installing Rsyslog With a MySQL and Loganalyzer
Ahhh… how to keep track of all of those logs. You could go fabulous and use Splunk (or one of splunks alternatives), but if you want some free and simple analysis with not a lot of extra load, rsyslog dumping into a database with Loganalyzer is a pretty decent option. For an introduction to rsyslog, […]
Live Graph of Apache Processes – Part 2 – Displaying Scale
There are 3 parts to this article: Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 In the introduction to this series we showed a graph of Apache processes (httpd). This article will show how to create the scale of the graph and the initial fig file entries. See Xfig.org for more details on the graphing […]
Forwarding Rsyslog Logs to Central Server
If you would like to forward your logs to a central syslog server, add something like this to the bottom of rsyslog.conf: $WorkDirectory /var/spool/rsyslog # where to place spool files $ActionQueueFileName fwdRuleall # unique name prefix for spool files $ActionQueueMaxDiskSpace 1g # 1gb space limit (use as much as possible) $ActionQueueSaveOnShutdown on # save messages […]
Live Graph of Apache Processes – Part 3 – Counting and Displaying
There are 3 parts to this article: Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 In this article we introduced this graph and showed how it looks live, and in this article we created the scale. Finally, we will get to the part that creates the blue bars that comprise the graph. Here is the […]
Syslog Client for Windows
The Rsyslog Windows Agent from Adiscon provides a comprehensive and scalable syslog client that runs on all Microsoft Windows operating systems from 2000 on up to 2012, even Windows 8. Installation is a typical next, next, next: The configuration options are many, and you can use TCP: Notice that you can queue at the client […]
Monitoring Systems With Zabbix – Initial Configuration – Part 1
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 Zabbix is an open source (GPL) monitoring system with a database back end. The system can be configured via a web browser. We used CentOS 4 for this install. Do set this up in a lab, first. Read […]
LMHOSTS Generator
In the Name Resolution section, we wrote about a technique for forcing the NBT cache to contain entries for critical servers on a network. Even if the WINS server is down or the entries are corrupt, the cached entries will allow name resolution. An LMHOSTS file is needed that contains all of the server names, […]
