Looking for monitoring software for networked PCs.

a reply to: Cygnis

Thanks for the update. Family, so no more, I was only trying to save you unnecessary work and headache but now it's for family, good luck!

Just kidding, well...kinda. My ex called me once with a simple computer problem.

I said "Click on the Start button and then, ..."
She said "What's the Start button?"

1 hour on the telephone, I kid you not! Gotta love 'em...

a reply to: LightSpeedDriver


Haha!


That is why I love teamviewer..


"Hey, I have a problem on my computer, so it's doing....."


"Ok... I'll login and you can show me what is going on.. hang on a sec.. "

originally posted by: Cygnis

originally posted by: trollz
You can actually create a PowerShell script that monitors those things and sends you an alert if they go above certain thresholds. I created something similar that did exactly that.
For example, one of the scripts I created did this: (The text got a little screwy in some places from copying to ATS. The brackets are supposed to be curly brackets, for example.)

I figured powershell and WMI would work, I just had no clue on how to implement something like that, however, could it be put into a graphical type setup, somehow?

I'd also need the monitoring on say a 60 second interval, if that would be possible?

Thanks!

Yes, you can output it into a graphical format with out-gridview, as in the image below.
You can definitely run the script every 60 seconds. I think there may be a few ways to do that.

originally posted by: LightSpeedDriver
a reply to: Cygnis

Thanks for the update. Family, so no more, I was only trying to save you unnecessary work and headache but now it's for family, good luck!

Just kidding, well...kinda. My ex called me once with a simple computer problem.

I said "Click on the Start button and then, ..."
She said "What's the Start button?"

1 hour on the telephone, I kid you not! Gotta love 'em...

Aye, family and a couple years working phone support for various companies..

It's no surprise I hide at home.. And I certainly don't advertise my knowledge.. Spouse does that for me more then often..

./hides...

I'm too lazy to go back and look to see if you would be running the management software on another machine or on your machine. Either way I'd probably use spiceworks to monitor the computers. It's free and pretty powerful and made to be easily used by more casual IT folks. If you ran it on your own computer and you had decent ram you could run it as a virtualbox machine.

To use spiceworks you would need to setup an admin account on each machine but you'd need to do that for just about any software to get the details of a computer. Spiceworks will track all the normal stuff (cpu, memory, disk space, etc) and will track things like installed software and do some decent reports.

For remote network management I like using mRemoteNG. Can be used as a "portable app". You can connect remote desktop, http, ssh, telnet, etc to network equipment to manage it. Easy to use and powerful. Portable app means you can put it on a thumb drive and carry it around and there is no need to install it.

I also agree on teamviewer and they have a "portable" version of this. Just search for portable teamviewer. Teamviewer can also be used to remote to android phones and I think apple phones.

I think the biggest network I've managed was about 1,300 users or so. But usually I manage around 300-400 users. Over the years I've used manage engine stuff (puke...), Cisco stuff, open source stuff like cacti, etc. What you are looking for is something like spiceworks. Sure you could script something complex and brag about it but why work that hard. You could setup a cacti server and marvel at your Linux skills. But there again why if you are not deep into IT geekland.

Hope you find a suitable solution.