What you need to know about AppManager

To help you understand the benefits of using the AppManager WMI Agent, here is a simplified overview of AppManager itself. We use Windows 2000 as an example because this WMI version of AppManager provides a subset of our monitoring features for Windows NT/2000, plus some specialized WMI monitoring features. However, keep in mind that the full NetIQ AppManager Suite provides many more Windows 2000/NT monitoring features, plus monitoring for Microsoft BackOffice applications such as Exchange and for other applications such as Lotus Domino. We also point out differences between the AppManager WMI Agent and the full AppManager product.

To monitor the health and performance of a Windows NT/2000 server or workstation, you install the AppManager Agent on that computer. The Agent runs as an extremely light-footprint service on the managed computer. From the AppManager Operator Console, you can schedule jobs, called Knowledge Scripts, to run on the managed computer. In the full AppManager product, these Knowledge Script jobs can run once, or you can schedule them to run on a regular basis (for example "once every five minutes" or "every second and fourth Thursday" of a month). In the WMI version, we have created default schedules for you.

The Knowledge Script jobs you run on a managed computer can monitor a wide variety of performance information. For example, you can monitor memory usage or the overall CPU load on the computer. In the full AppManager product, you can set up the job to generate an event when a threshold that you specify is exceeded, and these events can trigger a variety of actions, such as restarting a service, sending an email, or issuing a pager message. In this WMI version, we have preconfigured the Knowledge Scripts with common default thresholds, and events generated when these thresholds are exceeded are forwarded to the AppManager event table.

The Knowledge Script jobs can, optionally, collect data as well. The full AppManager product comes with a wide variety of prepackaged reports that you can run immediately from this data. In this WMI version, you can browse the collected data.

One of the key benefits of the full AppManager product is flexibility. AppManager is built with open, industry-standard technologies such as VBA scripting. You can easily tailor Knowledge Scripts to your needs, or write your own. The performance data you collect is stored in a SQL Server database, making it available for analysis and reporting through SQL or through third-party tools such as Crystal Reports.

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