Real-time monitoring of Windows Server 08 with Spotlight

Windows Server 2008 as a server platform has been gradually promoted and applied, rich features and good stability for which won a good reputation. However, compared to Windows Server 2003, the self-monitoring capabilities of their systems are not much improved. As a result, managers need to deploy a third-party tool to get the running state information of the server in real time to ensure its safe and stable operation. I recommend spotlight on Windows, which can meet your needs for real-time monitoring of the server, let you know the running state of the server at your fingertips.

1. Download and install

Spotlight Everyone can download from their official website (http://www.quest.com/spotlight-on-windows/), the installation process is very simple, according to the installation wizard can be easily done.

2. create a connection to the server

The spotlight supports local monitoring and remote monitoring of the server, but you need to create the appropriate connection before monitoring, and then you can implement monitoring of the server by activating the connection. The process of creating a connection is simple, respectively, to create a local connection and a remote connection. Run Spotlight to open its main interface, in the left pane there are three feature items liveconnections (active connection), allconnections (all connections), Welcome Tospotlight (Welcome to Spotlight).

Click on the Allconnections key below it has two items: Spotlight on Windows (freeware) and Spotlight on Windows Clusters, the first to create and set up local monitoring connections, The second implementation of cluster monitoring is to implement monitoring on multiple servers locally. We demonstrate how to create a server connection with local monitoring as an example.

Right-click on "Spotlighton Windows (Freeware)" and select "Connection Manager" to open the Connection Management window. Double-click New Connection to open the Connection Settings Wizard, select Spotlight on Windows (freeware) in select ConnectionType, and enter the connection name after the new connection name ( This example is Windows Server 2008) Click "OK" to go to the next Setup Panel.

In this panel you need to enter a variety of connection information, if you want to monitor the remote server, to enter their IP address, domains (domain name), user (username), Password (password), because it is local monitoring, we check to select Local machine. Click "OK" to create a connection,

Tip: If you want to modify the properties of a connection, you can change it by first selecting the connection and then tapping the Tools menu on the right side of the deployment to select Properties. At the same time, the connection can be deleted, renamed and so on under the menu item.

3, the server real-time monitoring

(1). Connect to the server

In the Spotlight main window, click "All Connections→spotlight on Windows (freeware)" To locate the connection named Windows Server 2008 that you just created. Double-click the connection can see the upper right image of the connection process, the connection process will pop up a dialog box, let you choose to set a correction time, the default is 1 hours, after the setting is complete tick "always calibrate new connectionsusing this seting" This option is used thereafter. (This calibration time is actually spotlight records the server health of a period of time, it will save the time of the server all the running state parameters, you can choose according to the needs.) Click OK to connect successfully, the connection appears in Liveconnections and Red, and the spotlight in the system tray also appears red, after which the color varies according to the state of the server's running status: Red, yellow, and blue. The current operating parameters of the server are displayed in the right pane.

2nd page: Spotlight's main functions (1)

　　

(2). View the performance of the server

Red Alert

You can see health conditions such as system, Network, CPU, Memory, Paging Files, disks, and so on in the monitor panel of the server. Spotlight in red, yellow, blue to identify the health of the server components: Red is an alert prompt, if any of the parameters show red, it indicates that the current server of the component performance of the emergency or a performance bottleneck, need to solve the problem immediately, the author server CPU utilization is too large, reached the 100%. Click the TOTALCPU usage area to eject the warning description and provide the solution for the administrator. If the item appears to indicate that the item is in sub-health, management precautions and attention are required. If it is green, the item runs normally.

Process monitoring

Click the Processes Tool button in the Spotlight toolbar to see how the server is currently running, with options far richer than the WindowsServer 2008 process Viewer. Clicking on a process will appear below a frame window showing the details of the process, which shows the various properties of the process, such as CPU User Mode, CPU Kernel mode, etc. that are not visible in the server 2008 Process Manager, Processdetails. This is very helpful for an experienced administrator to perform process analysis and error troubleshooting.

Clicking on the processhistory item will display the history of the page, Memory, Reads/writes, and other parameters in the form of an icon in 10-minute intervals (see Figure 4), which is much more visually recorded than the server 2008 process Manager. In addition, you can see the thread information for the process under the Threads key, which is not available to the Process manager of Server 2008.

In addition, the processes item includes services and system Drivers. Services can view the current service health of the server, and the Service View tool in spotlight organizes various services in a tree structure, allowing administrators to see the dependencies between services and to show more comprehensive services. System drivers includes information about all the drivers in the server and indicates the type and state of the drive, which is useful in optimizing the server.

CPU Monitoring

CPU is the main factor to consider server performance, and also the focus of server monitoring. Click the CPU Tools button in the Spotlight toolbar to see the current CPU run of the server, and spotlight to display the CPU's individual performance parameters as a chart. There are parameters such as server work Queues, kilobytes transferred, which are particularly important to servers, where server workqueues shows the responsiveness of the server to various requests, kilobytes Transferred shows the transfer speed of the server.

These two parameters are the administrator's focus on server monitoring, especially in the web, SQL and other clients interacting with the server these two indicators are critical. In addition, Spotlight supports multi-threaded, multi-core CPU monitoring. Spotlight records the server CPU running history, support to display the performance parameters as an icon, save the server operating parameters, the operation of the selection of the tool keys on the line.

　　3rd page: Spotlight's main functions (2)

Memory monitoring

Memory is another important indicator of server performance, and is not to be ignored in server monitoring. Click the Memory Tool button in the Spotlight toolbar to see the current run of the server's memory, and the same spotlight shows the memory utilization of the server as a graph. The relevant parameters are PhysicalMemory (physical memory), virtual memory, Paging (paging file), physical memory usage (physical memory utilization).

Spotlight records the utilization of server memory within one hours, using an administrator to debug errors when the server has a memory bottleneck. 6, the author of the server's physical memory is tight, especially in the time around 13:30 memory utilization is approaching the limit, then we can see the server log tracking this period of time what caused the server memory utilization is high. The Paging activity item can view the usage of the paging file, including the frequency, size, etc. of reading and writing. The cache entry is the caching utilization of memory, and the size of the memory cache is critical to providing the server's operational efficiency.

Disk Monitoring

Disk is an important server resource that is necessary for monitoring server disks such as FTP, WEB, and SQL. Click the Disks tool button in the Spotlight toolbar to see the health of the server's current disk. Under the Logical Disk Activity feature, you can see the disk performance status of the current server within one hours, and its related parameters are read, write, request, transfer rate and so on. From Figure 7, the author of the server C disk read and write frequently, and D disk almost no read and write operations, whereby the administrator can be in the server's disk to balance the deployment of related services software to reduce the read and write of a partition, request pressure to improve server disk performance. The Physical disk activity feature is similar to the above, except that it monitors the health of the server from the point of view of the physical disk. The Logical disk Space usage feature displays the utilization of each partition on the disk. Disksummary is a summary of disk information, the general server has a number of disks made Rad, through which you can view individual disk information.

Network Monitoring

For clients, the server's network performance is their most concern, but also the focus of server monitoring. Click the Disks tool button in the Network toolbar to monitor and view the status of your server. Under the network feature, you can see the server sending, receiving packets, and the transfer speed of incoming and outgoing packets within 1 hours. Another important thing is that errors and retries are the case of the error packet, and the administrator, through the monitoring of the error packet, determines the health status of the server network. The TCPIP function item is the monitoring of the server network from the point of view of protocol, including TCP, IP, UDP and so on. For Web servers, look at the TCP case, if the server receives an attack DDoS tool to view UDP data. Another useful feature is share, which can monitor and view the sharing in the server, which is typically used by the administrator to detect the server for intrusion.

(3). Related techniques

In order to facilitate the operation has made the spotlight better server monitoring, we can set it. Add the current server monitoring connection to your favorites for the next action by clicking "Favorites" to open the menu and selecting "Add to Fravorites" in it. Execute "view→options→alarm log" to open its Settings window, set the period of the alert log (hours, days, weeks) and filter. When Setup is complete, a warning dialog pops up when the server is in a performance crisis to alert the administrator to maintenance.

Real-time monitoring of Windows Server 08 with Spotlight