Posted by The Admin Arsenal Team on Wed, Sep 30, 2009
If you have a critical database in your environment then you owe it to yourself to perform, at the very least, the basic monitoring of the health of the database.
There are a few Performance Counters that I generally reference when I want to passively monitor the DB health. One of these counters is Log Flushes in the SQLServer:Databases category.
Your SQL server will flush a log (I know, I know, it sounds appealing) whenever it completes a transaction that involves inserting (or updating). Acceptable flushes per second will vary depending on the muscle of your hardware (RAM, CPU, High Performance HDD, etc).
In the example below, you will see a monitor that looks at the Log Flushes per Second counter. Every 30 seconds the number of flushes will be sampled and if the number of flushes is greater than 800 for three (3) consecutive samples then our defined Actions will be executed.
We have two defined actions. The first will fire off an email to an administrator displaying the reasons for the event.
In future posts we will show additional performance counters.
- Monitor Properties
- Define your actions
- Eventlog Action
Posted by The Admin Arsenal Team on Mon, Aug 03, 2009
Posted by Adam Ruth, Shane Corellian, and Shawn Anderson on Fri, Jun 26, 2009
OK, I am writing this on a Friday afternoon. I don't feel like starting a new project. I don't feel like working through my list of to-do's and, well, it's very obvious that I'm not the only person who feels like this today. But I'm at work, slightly bored and I have administrative rights on all of these computers. Sweet.
I think it's time to confuse the hordes of co-workers who are playing Solitaire. I'm gonna write a Monitor to watch for, and kill any running solitaire process.
Let's open up Admin Arsenal and select the Monitors button:
As you can see from the images above, I created a Monitor called Solitaire - Vista. I look for the executable called Solitaire.exe. Every 120 seconds Admin Arsenal (AA) will poll selected target systems and check to see if any process called Solitaire.exe is Running. If it detects the process running it will trigger two Actions that I have defined. The first will kill the process Solitaire and the other will send an email to me stating some information that about the event. If you notice in both Action examples I have called variables like {Process}. These variables can be select by pressing the 
button and selecting my desired variable.
After you define your Monitor, don't forget to add the targets. You can add individual machines or Collections or Active Directory OUs as targets. Since I'm bored, I'm going to select all Vista machines as targets.
Sit back and wait for various groans and grunts from other cubes.
*NOTE* For versions of Windows prior to Vista, the Solitaire exe is 'Sol.exe'
Posted by The Admin Arsenal Team on Fri, Jun 12, 2009
Photo by accent on eclectic
Sometimes when browsing I see that a particular site is down (this is especially discouraging when the site happens to be my own.) My first question is always the same: Is it just me or is everyone seeing this?
While perusing Server Fault I came across a question on website monitoring. One of the answers introduced me to DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com. It is JUST what I have been looking for.
DownForEveryone... is the brainchild of Alex Payne. He discussed his website with Eric Krapf of No Jitter. Here is how he explained his website to Eric.
The site is as dead-simple as it gets: it makes an HTTP HEAD request to the root ("/") of the user-provided domain. If I get a response code in the 200/300 series, I assume the site is up. If I get a 500 or a timeout, I assume the site is down.
Obviously this is good for the quick check when you see that something is down. For a more proactive approach to website monitoring you'll want to look at another solution. There are a ton of hosted website monitoring apps, or if you have several thousand bucks that you don't know what to do with you can always check out HP SiteScope(formerly Mercury).
But for a quick little tool that can keep you from calling your IT guy or your friends, downforeveryone... is just what you need.
Posted by The Admin Arsenal Team on Mon, Jan 26, 2009
Question: How do you condense 35 years of Windows system administration experience into 2-6 paragraphs?
Answer: The Admin Arsenal Blog.
Will it be technical? Yes.
Will it be simple? Hell no.
Will it be dripping with sarcasm? If there’s a god.
Will it be funny? Just look at Adam’s haircut (circa 1986).
We know the frustrations that System Admins endure. 2 AM calls from a frantic Help Desk Agent. Users (bless their hearts) whose computer savvy can only be described as “lacking”. Expanding IT expectations accompanied with shrinking IT budgets. Managers who get it (revel in this!), accompanied by managers who don’t.
Like you we’re IT admins. We get the good with the bad and that’s what we get paid for. Admins provide solutions, excuses come from the other team.
We’ve gleaned the IT world for answers over the years, and now we’re sharing what we’ve learned.
Here is some of what you can expect to see:
- The nuts and bolts of Software Deployment and Hardware & Software Inventory collection
- What to (and often as important, what NOT to) Monitor
- How utilizing Remote Management via Remote Assist and Remote Desktop can save you hours of your valuable time
- Admin Solutions – with solutions specific to Windows systems management
- News You Can Use – where we summarize and comment on other relevant blog posts
Welcome to the Admin Arsenal Blog.
The Admin Arsenal Team (If you would like to see more current pictures of us, click here.)
Shawn Anderson | 
Adam Ruth | 
Shane Corellian | 
Gwen Hilyard |