Managing Windows systems and applications

Introduction

Tap In Systems’ Cloud Management Service manages Windows systems and applications by performing service checks and sending status and performance event data to the Tap In Management Server, where it is stored in a MySQL database. Users then can access this monitoring data, conduct analysis, and perform actions using Tap In’s viewer applications – the Tap In QuickView client, the Tap In Web application, and Tap In desktop widgets.

External Checks

Users can perform two types of service checks: external and internal. External checks are executed on the Tap In Management Server and test services that are available over the Internet. External checks include:

HTTP/HTTPS
Ping
TCP port
SNMP polls
Web service calls

Since external checks don’t depend on internal infrastructure, they are useful for testing services as your customers or end users would see them. The external checks are configured using a Web interface on the Tap In Management Server.

Internal Checks

Internal checks are performed on the Windows system. They interact directly with the OS to gather information, then format and send the resulting events to the management server. Internal checks include:

CPU
Disk space
Memory
Event log messages

Internal checks are executed from Tap In’s Windows agent. Distributed as open source, the agent is a Powershell script which executes individual checks, interprets the results, creates a Tap In event, and then sends the event to the Tap In Management Server in the cloud. The checks to execute and their parameters, such as alerting thresholds, are defined in a configuration file. The agent is typically scheduled using the Windows task scheduler.

A configuration file on the Windows system defines the plugin scripts, execution parameters and alert thresholds for an agent. This file is designed so that common servers can use the same configuration file and system specific parameters do not need to be defined.

Integrating with Third Party Tools

If you already are using a tool to monitor some or all of your Windows systems and want to expand or enhance your capability using Tap In, you may choose to integrate your existing tool rather than replace it. The following examples describe how you would do this with Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM), Systems Center Operations Manager, and other Microsoft systems and applications:

Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) or Systems Center Operations Manager. Tap In’s Powershell integration module retrieves alerts from MOM and sends them to the Tap In Management Server using a Web service call. Tap In also can check the status of hosts monitored by MOM and generate events based on their status.
Other Microsoft products and applications. The approach used by Tap In’s Powershell integration module for MOM can generally be used to monitor any Microsoft application. Since Powershell can access .NET and COM objects, any application that uses these technologies can be integrated by customizing the basic Powershell script.

Generating Reports and Graphs

If performance information is presented to the Tap In Management Server, Tap In will store the information in either its internal database or in Round Robin Databases. Tap In can then generate graphs on this data, as shown below. This is an easy method of graphing any metric that needs tracking. Similar reports are available to show aggregated metric information.