We've done a fair amount of desktop monitoring in Point of Sale and trading floor environments. We've found that it's not about volume of information on desktops, it's more about monitoring for targeted scenarios.
For example in a capital markets trading floor environment, we monitor for the Bloomberg connection on the desktops to ensure that traders systems are pointing to the production Bloomberg server and not the UAT server. We monitor for the performance of individual instances of an application so that if one instance hangs , we can kill that instance without having to kill all instances. For PoS systems, we monitor for connectivity to the backend processing server through a synthetic transaction as well as local resources like paper for the printing of receipts. Setting up maintenance mode schedules for desktops or PoS are also a very important part of monitoring for systems that are not 'always on' like servers are as during business downtime periods such as when a theatre is closed from 1 am to 10 am, and the PoS systems are powered down for energy savings, you don't want to get heartbeat alerts or other alerts or for the unavailability to affect your availability metrics. Rory McCaw Managing Principal Consultant, Infront Consulting Group [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> M. 425-736-5803 O. 416-503-8350 x21 [View our profile on LinkedIn]<http://www.linkedin.com/company/infront-consulting-group>[Like us on Facebook]<https://www.facebook.com/InfrontConsulting>[Follow us on Twitter]<https://twitter.com/infrontconsult> [View our videos on YouTube] <http://www.youtube.com/user/infrontconsulting> [LowRes-Impact2012_Winner_Logo] From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Kevin Holman Sent: Thursday, August 29, 2013 9:46 AM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: [msmom] SCOM to monitor Desktops The majority of desktop monitoring I have seen is specific role machines running a desktop OS. Such as embedded/full OS POS machines, ATM, Kiosk, and those get monitored just like servers or critical services. I have also seen a fair amount of desktop monitoring that is done just to be proactive... such as VERY lightweight monitoring of event logs for disk errors/bad blocks/NTFS issues, lightweight performance reporting, inventory correlation. The agent queues this data and then sends it in to a MS whenever the laptop is online. Our client monitoring MP's are very light, and we don't monitor up/down/HB failure by default on client OS. It works quite well, you just don't treat them like critical 24x7 services. From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Thompson, Joseph W (Joe) Sent: Thursday, August 29, 2013 8:36 AM To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Subject: RE: [msmom] SCOM to monitor Desktops We have some field automation desktops that couldn't run a server os, so we use client monitoring for those. I couldn't imagine monitoring a standard users desktop From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of JRIT Sent: Thursday, August 29, 2013 8:20 AM To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Subject: [msmom] SCOM to monitor Desktops Folks, What is the good, the bad, and the ugly when we think use SCOM to monitor Desktops? Tnx ________________________________ THIS E-MAIL AND ANY MATERIALS TRANSMITTED WITH IT MAY CONTAIN CONFIDENTIAL OR PROPRIETARY MATERIAL FOR THE SOLE USE OF THE INTENDED RECIPIENT. ANY REVIEW, USE, DISTRIBUTION OR DISCLOSURE BY OTHERS IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED. IF YOU ARE NOT THE INTENDED RECIPIENT, OR AUTHORIZED TO RECEIVE THE INFORMATION FROM THE RECIPIENT, PLEASE NOTIFY THE SENDER BY REPLY E-MAIL AND DELETE ALL COPIES OF THIS MESSAGE.
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