Re: [SAGE] Question regarding Windows 2003 Server MMC Performance Monitor

["Sami Juvonen" <sami@juvonen.org>]

> To monitor the Windows 2003 servers performance, for example, like
> processors usage, Hard Disk I/O, network bandwidth, etc. What tool is
> the best?

Well, it depends ;-) Windows is actually very well instrumented and
you can access the WMI information from tools like VBScript or
PowerShell, not to mention the extensive command line tool wmic.exe.

> I know Microsoft offer the Performance monitor tool under MMC, it is
> built in Windows 2003, but it seems I can only use Remote Desktop then
> open that tool to use. Or actually I can have it on my local XP
> machine to monitor remote Windows 2003? If yes, how? If not, any one

Yes, you can. Run perfmon, select Performance logs and alerts, right
click Counter logs, select New log settings, name "foo" of course, Add
objects, Select counter objects from computer: \\servername. Needs the
'\\'.

The configuration file format is kind of XMLish, so if you save your
settings, you should be able to figure out how to create them
programmatically too.

> can suggest a good monitor tool running on Windows 2003 Server? I need
> monitor several Windows 2003 servers for their performance like
> processors usage, Hard Disk I/O, network bandwidth, etc.

I have set up Cricket to graph Windows counters at some point but I
can't remember any details about that any more. The docs should know.

If you are mainly a Linux shop, do you already use something like
Nagios to monitor your Linux boxes? (And if not, why not?) Nagios has
an agent for Windows too. If you cannot install the agent due to
policy reasons etc, check out http://nagios-wsc.sourceforge.net/ . It
allows you to set up one Windows box as a forwarder and WMI>Nagios
translator.

-sami.