From the course: Career Essentials in System Administration by Microsoft and LinkedIn

Commercial administration monitoring tools

From the course: Career Essentials in System Administration by Microsoft and LinkedIn

Commercial administration monitoring tools

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- [Voiceover] For CIS admins, commercial monitoring tools are essential for managing your devices in any organization. You'll need to monitor your server, workstations, and mobile devices no matter what operating system you're using. There are four main areas of reporting you'll need to ensure the health of your devices. The first is operational. This provides up to the minute targeted data about your devices and services both physical and virtual. You'll find out right away if a device is up or down or having critical issues with a specific service that may create an outage in the near future. You'll also want the control to be able to restart services or troubleshoot remotely if needed. Next, you'll want to know organizational information. This is a broader type of reporting such as device management state. This is useful for non-technical people such as managers and department heads. Historical information is our next reporting type. This provides patterns and trends over a period of time to see if equipment or services need to be replaced. Finally, you'll want the ability to do custom reporting. No two organizations are alike. So it's a good idea to be able to create the reports with information that is most useful for you. If you decide to use a Microsoft product like Intune, you can monitor all of these devices using all these report types. There is a monthly fee based on the device type and level of service you need. You can also use system center operations manager to do the same thing on premises. You'll have to provide your own hardware and do your own configuration but there are no monthly fees. There are many different brands of commercial software on the market to do realtime monitoring and reporting. Some of the most popular are Nagios, Z, LogicMonitor, Zabbix, Atera, and Splunk. There are also many free open-source products that don't come with support other than the support from the website or local expert. They include Nagios Core, Prometheus, PRTG, and others. Many of the free products are free up to a certain amount of devices. And then after that, they charge a fee per device. One thing to keep in mind when you pick monitoring software or a service is if they are considered secure. SolarWinds was a very popular monitoring software that was trusted by governments and many industries, but got hacked multiple times and compromised a lot of secure data. You'll also need to consider agent versus agentless. Agent is always going to be a better monitoring service because it works from inside of the client and outside of the service. There's much more you can report when you have an agent. Agentless is easier to setup because you won't need to install anything on the client computer, but it won't offer this same type of detail you may require for reporting. For instance, with agentless you'll know if the device is running, but you won't know if the CPU is getting too hot to run. You would only get that type of information if you had an agent installed. You should pick your software or service based on price, security, and functionality. Then you'll have the ability to know at any time whether your network devices are healthy or need attention.

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