Mar
12
Written by:
Sean Wilson
Friday, March 12, 2010 2:46 PM
If you are a Systems Administrator or responsible for systems in your organisation you are probably familiar with that gut-wrenching feeling that you get when a bunch of people arrive at your desk asking “Are you aware of any problems?” Of course it ain’t ever easy to answer such open ended questions - and the sad thing is that often the answer is “No!” in spite of the sudden arrival of evidence to the contrary...
So having been in this position how do you make sure that it never happens again? Fortunately there are many tools out there that can help with this scenario – but I’m going to briefly cover one particular tool that will suit most organisations from the very small to the very large, and can be set up in a matter of minutes. Seriously! The good news doesn’t stop there though, so read on....
PRTG Network Monitor is a server based application that can monitor virtually any network attached device using SNMP, WMI, PING, HTTP, SMTP, POP3, FTP, and can execute queries against SQL Servers. PRTG can also perform network data acquisition using Netflow, packet sniffing or SNMP to determine bandwidth usage and even provides a simple API for user-built custom sensors.
Installation could not be easier – you will need to provide details of accounts with access rights to perform certain monitoring tasks, but it’s pretty much Next, Next, Finish... It can even scan your network automatically for devices to monitor and set up all the appropriate sensors for you – but though this is a good way to learn about PRTG’s capabilities (and what you have in your network) you will probably find this overkill.
Once installed PRTG provides a desktop client, iPhone app and web-based UI for management and keeping an eye on things, and also a simple Windows tray app which will pop if there are any new alerts. Alerts can also be sent via email, SMS/pager, ICQ, MSN Messenger and so on...
So enough of the feature blurb – let’s look at a real world example that will help any SysAdmins out there with their journey to inner peace.
One particular nightmare for these guys which really jangles the nerves is when a hard disk fails on a business critical server – hopefully you have redundancy, a spare and a backup, but things are not always so orderly. 
Just to make life a little more predictable, most HD’s these days monitor themselves and the OS is able to determine whether the drive is predicted to fail (ever seen a “Predictive Failure reported” entry in your Windows event log?) PRTG is here to help. We simply create a new sensor of type “WMI Eventlog Monitor”, give it a name and tell it which log we are interested in (“System”). Note that custom WMI queries are also supported.
Once the bare sensor has been created there is some simple configuration to tell it what to look out for – we are tracking “Warning” events with a message that matches “Predictive Failure reported”:
And finally we enable some limits – I’ve set it to 1. This means that instead of just graphing the values we will get an alert when we get any new event log entries meeting the set criteria.
Now our hero can sit back and relax – at least until PRTG pops up with an alert, but at least he can be confident that he will know about this issue before a bunch of irate users arrive at his desk!
“So?” I hear you ask, “how much?!?!”
How ‘bout FREE! Seriously! And it’s not a crippled or time-limited trial. OK – so you only get 10 sensors, 20 if you register with Paessler – but 10 sensors is a lot of peace of mind for nothing... So download it, install it on that clunky old machine gathering dust in the corner and point it at your worst nightmare. When you want to upgrade to get the extra sensors (and PRTG is so good you’ll have no hesitation in parting with the cash for the extra peace of mind) give us a call!
For more information:
To find out more about Monitoring Software – click here.
To download PRTG Network Monitor – click here.
To buy PRTG Network Monitor – click here.
Or, just post your query, I’ll be watching….
Copyright ©2010 Sean Wilson