New LPI Monitoring Templates

cgross@mobilizesmb.com — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 06:00:00 GMT

For all of our MSPSN members using Level Platforms, we have uploaded two new monitoring templates to the Downloads section:

MSPSN Windows Workstation Template for monitoring Windows XP and 2000 clients.

MSPSN Trend C/S/M Template for monitoring Trend's Client/Server/Messaging for SMB.

Also, the MSPSN LPI Monitoring Overview PDF document has been removed from the individual zipped downloads and added as a separate download - primarily to make it easeir to manage revisions to that document.

Download update

cgross@mobilizesmb.com — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 06:00:00 GMT

For our MSPSN members - just a quick note to inform you that the first of our monitoring templates for Level Platforms' Managed Workplace has been posted to the downloads page. MSPSN SBS 2003 Monitoring Template is a zip archive that includes the template xml file and an overview document detailing the contents of the template. If you have any questions - post them to the MSPSN LPI forum.

Monitoring with Level Platofrms

cgross@mobilizesmb.com — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 06:00:00 GMT

As many of you know, we are using Level Platforms' Managed Workplace to monitor our clients' networks. During our MobilizeSMB tour this past year, we received a large number of requests for more information regarding what we monitor, and what we alert on. The good news is that MSPSN members will soon be able to download the monitoring templates we use, as well as documentation explaning the contents of each template and why we chose to include what we did.

But for everyone else, I wanted to give a high-level insight into my thinking when I started monitoring client systems. First and foremost - keep it simple! It is very easy to get overwhelmed with the number and variety of items you can monitor. When I started monitoring with LPI almost 3 years ago, there weren't any monitoring templates available - so I started setting up my monitoring with a simple question: What conditions could bring a server down? This led to the basics - processor / memory utilization, hard drive free space, and the like. The next question I asked was: What are the core services that I always want running on servers and workstations? This was again pretty simple to answer - Exchange, IIS, Anti-Virus, etc. The third and final question I asked was: What trending & log data would I like to have access to if a machine is down? Again - a fairly simple question to answer - Event Logs, resource utilization, etc.

Those three questions shaped our monitoring in the beginning. Now, while our monitoring templates have changed over the years as we encountered new situations - just about everything can still be traced back to those three questions.

One particular note of interest - during our MobilizeSMB tour, anyone who attended heard me say that I liked to capture all event logs within LPI for diagnostic purposes for when a PC was down. Well, it seems that my memory failed me - as I forgot that while I do collect all Application and System events, I do not collect all security events. Why you ask? Well let's say I was reminded of the reason this summer when I went through some housecleaning and rebuild some of our monitoring templates and moved our Service Center to new hardware. When I rebuilt the templates, I included capturing all security events. It took under 3 weeks to completely fill a 100GB data partition with my SCData database - and 99% of its size was directly related to the EventLog table. Adding more space to the system and executing a query to remove all security related entries considerably shrunk the size of the database back to something manageable.

SMB MSP Technical Process

New LPI Monitoring Templates

Download update

Monitoring with Level Platofrms