| Power Admin Server Monitor |
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| Written by Richard Thompson, Thursday, 20 September 2007 | |
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They say that knowledge is power, therefore the more knowledge you have over your server farm you have the more powerful you are as an administrator. Correct? Well I think so anyway! The download is only 3mb so on a decent speed connection shouldn’t take more than 10 seconds or so. The most difficult part of the software is navigating to the download page, which in all fairness is incredibly simple. Installation is merely a next next next finish type installation leaving you with the option to launch the console following installation. Configuration is also simple, first up you get a screen to configure your username, password and domain which your monitor service account belongs to. Alternatively you can make use of a Local system account, however in a large domain you may as well create a service account with a complex password to ensure all servers can be accessed. The configuration wizard then gives you the option to enter an email address, smtp server and other email configuration options you would find in any monitor system. You are then prompted to enter a log file location. This location will need to exist prior to configuring the location. This is perhaps one aspect which PA could develop. Simply entering a location could create the folder, that said forcing you to create it will mean you will know where it is! How many times do you download something and then afterwards cannot find it and need to download it again? Following that you are presented with an easy configuration window! This is great because it allows you to type the server names you want to configure into the block and then you can select to auto configure various monitors and then auto configure all of the named servers. Something to note is that when adding servers to the list you need to enter each server name on a new line. If that server requires a specific username and password, example would be a dmz server not on your domain you would specify this by typing in the server ‘name,username,password’. Having worked with the software what I would recommend on first installation is that you only enter one of each different server you want to configure (eg, 1 domain controller, 1 file server, 1 citrix server , etc). What this will do is allow you to create a template and then use this template later when you import all of the other servers. Your server will wait 30 seconds from adding it to when it starts to populate the information. This is done to reduce the load on the server as generally you add a couple of serves to the monitor application at a time. Once the initial data collection is complete you will receive a dashboard view of the servers and devices. This will show an overall summary of your server which allows you to immediately identify if a server has something wrong. Critical errors and items which are down are shown in red, warnings yellow and items which are ok are green. This dashboard allows you to click into each server and review which component is reflecting with an error and also see a summary of the server resources. See fig 1
Ok so I’ve gone on and on all this time talking about the software and configuring it, so lets talk about what it actually can monitor. Like any half decent monitor application it does the following basics: On top of those basic tests it also supports the following tests: Having a system which reports on server uptime, service uptime, etc is one thing, how this system reports this information to you is something else. So how does PA’s Server monitor Pro report you of errors? Well for a start there is obviously the traditional email message which providing you setup your smtp server correct earlier will work. Then there is the old method of writing to a text file and a Windows event log, playing sounds and even sending a net send message. All of the above are pretty standard with most of the monitoring tools mentioned in the beginning of this article. What new methods do PA provide? Well for one is a dial up connection, obviously you would need a modem, but assuming you had the hardware in place the software could tell the server to start a dial up connection which would allow you to connect from externally to the server and resolve the issue. It executes a program or script on the server, this could be a script to reboot the server, restart the server, email someone or anything you want. It opens a message box on the screen, sends a pager alert or a text message or can restart the service. I don’t think there are many more automated options you could even dream of adding to the list short of having some random robot sitting there responding to your telephone commands! Licensing for this software is interesting. Licenses are purchased on a per server or per monitor basis. It is entirely your choice. Lets assume you buy a Pro-5 pack which includes 5 servers or 100 monitors. Lets assume you choose a per server licensing model. This would allow you to run as many monitors as you choose against 5 different servers OR run 100 monitors against as many different servers as you want. A Pro-5 pack will cost you $299 dollars which is quite a bargain when you consider a Pro License which includes 1 server or 20 monitors retails for $99. Power Admin have 2 other licensing models which would be particularly beneficial for large organizations. These models are Pro site and Pro enterprise. A site license would allow an unlimited number of monitors at one site to be monitored and the enterprise any number of servers within an enterprise regardless of the number of sites. These retail at $799 and $1899 respectively. So now the all important question…. What do I think about the software? Well the dashboard view is not the prettiest view I’ve seen a monitor solution present, but it is effective. An admin is more concerned about how well a product works than how pretty the views are which is where I think PA hit the nail on the head. From the onset this software has just worked for me. The configuration is really simple, it is easy to navigate around the software and as I mentioned above the software does some really good monitoring. Yes the software has a few areas which is can be developed, examples being the server status summary report could automatically refresh every 30 seconds to a minute, the console could minimize to tray, perhaps a feature where you can log to a SQL express or SQL database to draw extended reports from. Overall I feel for the money you are paying for this product you get loads of value. From my short evaluation the support I got from PA was fantastic, email correspondence was brilliant in that emails where responded to within a couple of minutes. All that said please do not just take it from me, get on to the PA website at http://www.poweradmin.com/servermonitor/ and look at this product along with some of their other products including Storage monitor, File sight and WatchDisk.
Edit... On top of this specific Citrix monitors will be added among other features.
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