MRTG is free but a pain to setup and
reporting is limited. Some swear by Cacti, but setup is also complex. A reasonable cost effective tool is
Paessler. Windows-specific, but well implemented and supported. http://www.paessler.com/ It has a packet capture mode (aka “sniffer”)
which will do a lot more than just snmp counting and exports reports to pdf From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
Behalf Of Goran Jovanovic Hi Robert, All very good questions. The client is paying for piece work as
opposed to an hourly rate so monitoring time spent against time billed is not a
concern. Mostly they want to know if the developers
are using the environment that has been provided to them. 2 SQL servers, 2 web
servers, 2 application servers. Comments like did they just upload the new
stuff the day before the deliverable date? Are they using the environment that
was provided for 5 minutes a day or hours per day? I am thinking of it as more of a
validation of the whole support environment for the developers rather than did
they update/fix that web page. Monitoring the host machines via SNMP
might be an idea. Any simple (but good) tool leap to mind? Thanks Omega Network Solutions From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
Behalf Of Robert E. Spivack Let’s start at the high-level: What question are you trying to
answer? e.g: “Are the developers
spending enough time doing the work they should be doing”? “Are the developers doing
things they should not be doing”? “Are the developers competent
and performing their job properly”? “Are the developers hours spent
working matching their timesheets/project sheets? Etc. There are different solutions
depending upon your objectives. Note: Personally, for outsourcing I
pay based on a project or deliverable so tracking time/usage is of no interest
to me. I pay for a certain result and don’t care if it takes an
hour or a week to do it. Also, I audit the quality of the finished
product/code/service, I don’t care about the tools/methods used to reach
that goal. In your case: Since you have a virtual server environment,
you can also audit at the host level. E.g. you can run SNMP tools and
measure traffic (bps and total bytes in/out) on the virtual network ports of
the virtual machine to see the activity level. You can see the protocol (http,
http, netbios, smb, etc.) to see what type of activity is flowing through the
machine. If you run the tool in a virtual machine on the same physical
host, it can use packet capture to fully analyze the traffic and not just
SNMP/WMI. You might consider re-writing your
outsourcing contract. You really shouldn’t have to police the
project/micromanage it. Afterall, management of outsourcing is the hidden
cost that can eat you alive and remove any cost benefits so why allow yourself
to fall into that black hole? From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
Behalf Of It is a dev/staging server running in a
virtual server environment so I have to be a bit careful what I turn on or
don’t. I tried the auditing a file. Wow talk
about generating Security Event Log records. I turned auditing on for two files
bginfo.exe and its corresponding config.bgi file. Then I ran it to generate the
background on file server. That simple little thing created 15 log entries. If we turn this on we are going to need
something to parse the security log file as I can see that it is going to
produce a HUGE amount traffic in there. Omega Network Solutions From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
Behalf Of Shaun Mickey You could also enable auditing in Windows to examine
file level access, just r-click on any file/folder and select properties, click
on the security tab then click advanced then click on the auditing tab. WARNING: auditing a lot of high-use files could
strain the server That being said, your on a dev server so it should be
alright, though I would keep the number of files you’re auditing to a
minimum or as small a group as possible Thanks, Shaun ----------------------------------------------------------- "Internet/Technology Solutions for
Business and Government" From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
Behalf Of Darin Cox Source code activity would be best
analyzed with Visual SourceSafe or another code control system. For
watching use of the sites for testing, etc. just enable logging for the virtual
webs and run reports on the web traffic.
----- Original Message ----- From: Goran Jovanovic Sent: Wednesday, May 31, 2006 2:35 PM Subject: [Declude.JunkMail] OT: Monitoring/Auditing a Windows Server Hi All, This is definitely an off topic question. I have a client that wants to monitor what
their outsourced developers are doing. The development is taking place in IIS,
.Net Application Server and SQL 2000. They want to know generally speaking what
they are doing. Are the development servers being used/tested? Would not have
to report on what exactly is being changed etc but some sort of activity
report. Does anyone know of anything that can
report on this type of activity. Thanks Omega Network Solutions |
- RE: [Declude.JunkMail] OT: Monitoring/Au... Shaun Mickey
- RE: [Declude.JunkMail] OT: Monitoring/Au... Goran Jovanovic
- Re: [Declude.JunkMail] OT: Monitori... Darin Cox
- RE: [Declude.JunkMail] OT: Monitoring/Au... Goran Jovanovic
- RE: [Declude.JunkMail] OT: Monitori... Robert E. Spivack
- RE: [Declude.JunkMail] OT: Moni... Harry Vanderzand
- RE: [Declude.JunkMail] OT: Monitoring/Au... Shaun Mickey
- RE: [Declude.JunkMail] OT: Monitoring/Au... Goran Jovanovic
- RE: [Declude.JunkMail] OT: Monitori... Robert E. Spivack
- RE: [Declude.JunkMail] OT: Monitoring/Au... Dave Marchette
- RE: [Declude.JunkMail] OT: Monitoring/Au... Jay Sudowski - Handy Networks LLC
- RE: [Declude.JunkMail] OT: Monitori... Kevin
- [Declude.JunkMail] Windows Gui ... Kevin
- Re: [Declude.JunkMail] Wind... R. Lee Heath
- Re: [Declude.JunkMail] Wind... Ncl Admin
- RE: [Declude.JunkMail] Wind... William Stillwell
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