Daily Status Report - Servers

I'm writing a PowerShell script that gathers information about servers stores it in SharePoint lists and also emails it using charts from the Google API. Right now it does disk utilization and I am in the process of adding features such as VMware storage, and event log errors.

What other sorts of information would you like to have at your finger tips when you come in to work in the morning?

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Comments

wastedtime

Cool, I have always liked doing stuff like this. The only thing I can think of that you haven't listed is hard disk array information and redundancy issues (power supply failures, raid controller issues, etc). Depends on your setup but that type of setup. Stuff that needs immediate attention in other words.

dynamik

RobertKaucher wrote: »

What other sorts of information would you like to have at your finger tips when you come in to work in the morning?

Contact information for attractive women.

CPU and memory utilization seem like obvious ones. Checking services and the machine itself to make sure everything's online is another gimme. I'd just review features in popular monitoring applications and common performance counters and see if anything else jumps out at you.

Cool project

RobertKaucher

I've looked at some monitoring tools and the thing is I do not want this to be a monitoring utility but just have the most essential info that might allow me to observer trends. I use Nagios for monitoring and that works fine. I'd just like to have something in the morning that shows me an overview of critical systems.

I'm just thinking disk space, memory usage, disk usage, and event log....

wd40

Ping response time.

The first thing we do in the morning, and last thing before we leave, is to run a simple batch that pings all servers , branch gateways and ATM routers and save the result in a simple text file.

forkvoid

RobertKaucher wrote: »

I'd just like to have something in the morning that shows me an overview of critical systems.

Um... isn't that what Nagios does? That's the entire purpose of 'Tactical Overview'. Sounds like your Nagios needs more configuring.

RobertKaucher

forkvoid wrote: »

Um... isn't that what Nagios does? That's the entire purpose of 'Tactical Overview'. Sounds like your Nagios needs more configuring.

Nagios sends daily status report dash boards via email of only a specific subset of the hosts being monitored that I can access on my phone regardless of if there is an issue or not?

I monitor about 25 hosts with Nagios. I don't want to see them all first thing. I want a very high level overview of my top 5 servers and some info about my VMware systems so I know what to expect in the morning.

The problem I have with Nagios is that it gives me more info than I want initially and it does not track things in a way that my boss,a non-technical user, can understand easily. So when I **** all the data about disk utilization into a SharePoint list and track it over x number of weeks with a graph that he can see from the main IT SharePoint site it makes life easier on me and him.

Plus, if I rely on Nagios for this I don't get any additional experience in scripting with PowerShell, which is really why I am doing it in the first place.

forkvoid

RobertKaucher wrote: »

Nagios sends daily status report dash boards via email of only a specific subset of the hosts being monitored that I can access on my phone regardless of if there is an issue or not?

I monitor about 25 hosts with Nagios. I don't want to see them all first thing. I want a very high level overview of my top 5 servers and some info about my VMware systems so I know what to expect in the morning.

The problem I have with Nagios is that it gives me more info than I want initially and it does not track things in a way that my boss,a non-technical user, can understand easily. So when I **** all the data about disk utilization into a SharePoint list and track it over x number of weeks with a graph that he can see from the main IT SharePoint site it makes life easier on me and him.

I configure mine to tell me things only if it exceeds thresholds I set. For disk, if utilization exceeds 80%, it goes yellow, 90% it goes red. I do similar things for everything else I need to monitor.

That means when I open Nagios, Tactical View shows me a blank slate if all is good. If something is wrong, I see it immediately. If I want detail, I go into Host Detail, Service Detail, etc. That's for the technical user. Tactical is for the non-technical or analyst. I can also do trending with it, but I haven't worked with it yet.

Plus, if I rely on Nagios for this I don't get any additional experience in scripting with PowerShell, which is really why I am doing it in the first place.

Fair enough.

brad-

Uptime
Network Utilization %
Date since last backup (if possible)

RobertKaucher

forkvoid wrote: »

That means when I open Nagios, Tactical View shows me a blank slate if all is good.

Yes, and that is exactly what I *DON'T* want. I want to see high level info regardless of the warning level.

Like I said, I don't want to use this for active monitoring. I just want a status report, not an error or warning report. If disks on server w-z are perfectly fine with 90% free I want to see it. Just as an example, if it jumps from 90% free to 80% free in one day, I want to know.

The deal is, with these critical servers I don't assume Nagios is going to do anything other than react to predefined conditions. From an administrative ethos, I believe I should know certain things about my critical systems, not just that there are no errors. Does that make sense?

forkvoid

Yes, I understand what you're saying now. Nagios does only react to changed presets... I suppose it could do what you want, but would take heavy configuration to make it work.

I would certainly love to see what you come up with on the PowerShell stuff, though.

RobertKaucher

dynamik wrote: »

Contact information for attractive women.

This is already built into PowerShell. It's undocumented, but run

$imanerd = Get-HotChicksNumber

The alias is

hc

It returns the following numbers in it's out put, though:
Humor Hotlines - Rejection Hotline Numbers By State