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 = 1For all systems in subsidiary 2 for customer A, CustomerID = 1 and SystemID = 2For all systems in subsidiary 1 for customer B, CustomerID = 2 and SystemID = 1For all systems in subsidiary 2 for customer B, CustomerID = 2 and SystemID = 2For all systems in subsidiary 3 for customer B, CustomerID = 2 and SystemID = 3Scenario 2A 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? SolutionTo monitor customer’s server, you can put in different CustomerIDs into each of the agents. For all systems of Customer A, CustomerID = 1For all systems of Customer B, CustomerID = 2Now with the help of CustomerID, these machines are uniquely identifiable. You can also use Set Property feature to rename the server. Scenario 3A 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. SubsidiariesA will be assigned CustomerID = 1B will be assigned CustomerID = 2DepartmentsMarketing department will be assigned SystemID = 1Engineering department will be assigned SystemID = 2Production department will be assigned SystemID = 3If 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 4I 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”? SolutionTo 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. |