Hardware Configurations for Receiving Messages

Hardware Configurations for Receiving Messages

Created 2004-12-08 by Hamid Ali Raja

I want to receive messages from various sources on my central server. What should be the hardware configurations for it?

It depends on the average and expected number of messages that each of the devices will generate.

In general, you can write the syslog data to a SQL database. HOWEVER, the SQL server performance is a key issue with such an approach. Even if the devices have moderate load, you need to highly optimize the SQL server backend and you probably also need multiple receivers. To learn more about this check out the article entitled performance optimizing syslog server.

Discussion on MonitorWare SystemID and CustomerID

Discussion on MonitorWare SystemID and CustomerID

Created 2004-12-06 by Hamid Ali Raja

SystemID

It is a user-configurable numerical value that has been added for grouping a group of systems and improves filtering. It is just like a numerical code to which you can assign a value and query it afterwards.

CustomerID

It is similar to SystemID. It depends on user that how he uses these.

Let us consider the following scenarios to better understand the functionality of these two:

Scenario 1

A service provider has 2 customers, customer A with 2 subsidiaries and customer B with 3 subsidiaries. How can he use SystemID and CustomerID to configure all systems in different subsidiaries to monitor his customers’ networks?

Solution

His configurations for this scenario will be:

  • For all systems in subsidiary 1 for customer A, CustomerID = 1 and SystemID = 1
  • For all systems in subsidiary 2 for customer A, CustomerID = 1 and SystemID = 2
  • For all systems in subsidiary 1 for customer B, CustomerID = 2 and SystemID = 1
  • For all systems in subsidiary 2 for customer B, CustomerID = 2 and SystemID = 2
  • For all systems in subsidiary 3 for customer B, CustomerID = 2 and SystemID = 3
  • Scenario 2

    A service provider has 2 customers. Customer A has 5 servers and Customer B has 2 servers. Both A and B happen to have a server named “SERVER”. How can the service provider use customer ID to monitor his customer’s servers and differentiate between them?

    Solution

    To monitor customer’s server, you can put in different CustomerIDs into each of the agents.

  • For all systems of Customer A, CustomerID = 1
  • For all systems of Customer B, CustomerID = 2
  • Now with the help of CustomerID, these machines are uniquely identifiable.

    You can also use Set Property feature to rename the server.

    Scenario 3

    A single user has two subsidiaries (A & B) and also wants to group machines by department (marketing, engineering and production). How can he do this using both CustomerID and SystemID?

    Solution:

    He can address his problem by assigning a unique CustomerID to each subsidiary and unique SystemID to individual department.

    Subsidiaries
  • A will be assigned CustomerID = 1
  • B will be assigned CustomerID = 2
  • Departments
  • Marketing department will be assigned SystemID = 1
  • Engineering department will be assigned SystemID = 2
  • Production department will be assigned SystemID = 3
  • If he wants to view all marketing department machines, he queries for SystemID = 1 and to view all machines in subsidiary A, he queries for CustomerID = 1. He can also get machines which belong to both production department and subsidiary 1 by using CustomerID = 1 and SystemID = 3.

    Scenario 4

    I have three subsidiaries A, B and C with 200, 2000 and 5000 machines respectively. If I can use “FromHost” to get the system information then why do I need “SystemID”?

    Solution

    To query all subsidiary C machines using “FromHost” is a lengthy task as it has 5000 elements and you also need to update the queries each time a new machine is installed in a subsidiary.

    If you just query the SystemID, you have a single query element PLUS you do not need to modify the queries when you install and configure your new machine correctly to the subsidiary.