Remotely Monitoring Processes on Win 2003 Server

[mmcgough]

Does anyone know how you can remotely monitor pcresses on a win 2003 server? This is a project I am working on for my job and would like to know what is available to make this happen.

Thanks in advance.

[Midknyte]

you can configure an MMC to monitor processes on the remote system. you could just use terminal services to connect as an admin and monitor directly, but that may affect network tests. you can always set auditing and check the event viewer.

other than that, you'd probably need an addon like SMS or a third party option like altiris.

process explorer from sysinternals.com can give you a quick snapshot of processes running on the server.

www.labmice.net has some good info.

[mmcgough]

Forrest

1) Need to make sure IIS is running and properly responding. Should be able to do this with a What’s up type program

Web server (secure/gateway)
IIS 6.0



2) Need to make sure he is properly able to receive mail. Might be best to just telnet to 25 or something to ensure SMTP working. Should be able to do this with a What’s up type program

Bubba
Linux
Mail server

– Not visible to outside world

3) Need to ensure SQLServer is running at all times as well as SQL Agent. Should be able to do this with a What’s up type program

Momma
SQL Server 2000
Windows 2003 Server

Ltdan – not visible to outside world
4) Spam Listener running here, triggered from Momma hourly. Can sometimes hang. We actually issue a psexec command from momma which then runs this process on Ltdan. This process outputs to a file on momma all activity. What we could potentially check is whether this file remains a specific size for longer than x minutes. This would potentially indicate process has frozen. Other alternative is to check for database table record count periodically to ensure count increases over time. Objective is to be notified if process freezes and stays in memory.

Windows 2003 server
Spam report processing

Chocolate – not visible to outside world.

5) Unsubscribe processor runing here. Use psexec as well. Triggered from SQL Agent on Momma. Process redirects output to file on Momma. In theory, this file should be growing all during processing. What we could do here is run a check to see if the process is running and then compare the prior file size to current file size to ensure growth. Perhaps run every 5 minutes. Should always be larger. Objective is to notify if process freezes or fails to run.

Windows 2003 server
Unsubscribe processing

We also would like to monitor the size of some files on the hard drive of the server and see if the size is incrementing like every 5 mins or so.

We need some way to monitor the processes and see if they are getting hung up. We also need a way to find out if they are doing their jobs in relation to the SQL databae too.

Any thoughts are greatly appreciated and I will look into what you posted before for tomorrow. I am currently in Win Server 2003 class but I am still in the begining stages of it.

[kwebb]

Nevermind. Saw processes and thought you were trying to monitor the system processes you would see in something like task manager. If you just want to monitor processes, explorer.exe/lsass.exe/etc... then just use performance monitor.

[gtaylor]

Use the remote desktop connection if you don't run terminal services. The client can be downloaded from MS if you don't have XP.

[mmcgough]

Thanks for the info, but does anyone know of any commericially available products that might be able to do this.