Thursday, October 27, 2011

Remote Server Monitoring with MobilePCMonitor



While I'm a big fan of systems like Solarwinds and other network/server/device monitoring solutions for larger corporate environments, there are many cases where one simply wants to monitor a few critical servers.  As if anyone needed another reason to buy a smartphone, take a look at MobilePCMonitor.  The beauty of this solution is it's hybrid approach, with an agent residing on the server or PC you wish to monitor, reporting to a hosted service at MPcM's datacenter.  So, while you have an agent to install on your machine(s), there's no server setup in your environment to make this work.  And, it gets better.  MPcM isn't just redlight/greenlight monitoring, you can tag services to monitor, disk space thresholds, cpu utilization, and more.  Should you get an alert on your smartphone (there are iOS, Android and WinPhone7 apps), you can log into your PC from the mobile app and perform a myriad of tasks instead of breaking out the laptop and hoping to get a reliable VPN connection via your cellular modem.  Still not convinced?  It's free to try for up to 3 monitored devices, and for up to 25 devices it's only $181 per year (total, not per device), making it a real bargain.

Key Features:

Monitor:
    * View the status and uptime of all computers
    * View the current CPU usage and usage history chart
    * View the current available memory and usage history chart
    * View the external IP address and the location on the map using GeoIP
    * View ping round trip response time and response time chart
    * View the status and browse the local hard disks
    * View the services status
    * View the network interfaces status and traffic chart
    * View running processes
    * View event logs
    * View the scheduled tasks status
    * View monitored ports status
    * View all logged in users (local and remote)
    * View hardware details like temperatures (system, CPU and HDD) and fan speeds (system and CPU)
    * View the status of web sites and application pools in Internet Information Server
    * Search and view user accounts status in Active Directory
    * View the list of locked user accounts in Active Directory
    * View the list of user groups in Active Directory
    * View performance counters

Send Commands:
    * Start, pause, continue and stop a service
    * Kill a process
    * Start and stop a scheduled task
    * Log off any logged in user (local or remote)
    * Send a message to the logged in users (local or remote)
    * Command prompt support
    * Restart, wake up (Wake on WAN over Internet is supported), shutdown, power off, suspend or send the computer into hibernation
    * Send commands to multiple computers in the same group
    * Start/stop/restart Internet Information Server web sites
    * Start/stop/recycle Internet Information Server application pools
    * Enable, disable, unlock and reset password for user accounts in Active Directory
    * Add and remove groups for a user account in Active Directory
    * Check and install Windows updates
    * Monitor and manage Exchange 2007 and 2010
    * Hyper-V support
    * Printers management
    * Mobile device authorization for system commands - only selected authorized devices on your account can be allowed to send system commands

Get Notified:
    * When a computer goes offline
    * When a computer starts up, shuts down, suspends or resumes
    * When a computer battery level is low
    * When a monitored service stopped unexpectedly
    * When the free memory is below a specified percentage
    * When the processor usage is above a specified percentage for a specified period of time
    * When the free space of a hard disk drive is below a specified percentage
    * When a user logs in or logs out
    * When ping round trip time is above a specified value for a specified period of time
    * When a monitored port is closed
    * When an event log entry is generated and it matches a specified filter
    * When the CPU, system or HDD temperature exceeds a specified threshold
    * When the CPU or system fan speed is below a specified threshold
    * When a web site has stopped on Internet Information Server
    * When an application pool has stopped on Internet Information Server

This is a great solution for smaller environments where you simply need notification in case of a problem, and the ability to quickly resolve the problem remotely via your smartphone.  They also have a dashboard application you can run on your PC to constantly show monitored device status.  For larger environments they offer an Enterprise version that you can run on an internal server instead of relying on their hosted service.
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