In this article we’ll discuss creating a command line interface to query the Monitis Agents and Monitors you have activated for your systems. We’ll provide the source code for the utility in VBScript and we will also be working on a C# version.  We’ll keep things simple for now and start with VBScript and provide a link to the complete source at the end of this article.

To get started we need to identify what information we want to display from our Monitors, what can be easily supported, and what is not supported.  The main parts are the different types of agents that Monitis offers, which are the Internal,
External, and custom monitors.

In this article we’ll focus on the basic ‘framework’ of the utility that deals with the definition of some classes to make working with the various agents and monitors easier, accepting and processing command-line arguments, and a small function library to keep our main script very clean. We’ll introduce a neat little feature of VBScript showing you how to work with include files.

In the previous article we’ve shown how easy it is to integrate popular Nagios server monitoring commands, or plugins, with Monitis M3 monitoring framework.

However, given the fact you have a working Nagios configuration, which is vast and complex – I can sympathize with your unwillingness to actually migrate to Monitis.

Nagios, a systems monitoring software

What’s Nagios? – Nagios is a rather simplistic monitoring software. And I like simple things. Nagios’ responsibility is not necessarily to draw nice graphs for your boss or collect data you may or may not need.

Nagios simply decides whether your system runs properly. And for this question there is a very explicit answer – a YES or a NO. Nagios will alert you if the answer is a NO.

In the following article I’m going to show how easy it is to integrate Nagios with Monitis.

Mon.itor.us is our 100% free website and server monitoring service. It is unique among similar services in that it imposes no cap on the number of URL’s monitored. As a result, we have some users monitoring hundreds, even thousands of URL’s from one account, for free, forever. That’s great, but what if you want to upgrade to our premium service, Monitis? Until now, you had to set everything up from scratch, but we’ve decided to make it extremely easy with a new Upgrade Wizard. It walks you through easy steps that allow you to select the monitors you’d like to keep and/or add in your upgraded account.

Nagios is a widely used monitoring software for systems and networks. It provides the flexibility to monitor anything on your systems or networks using a script or plugin.  Known for having plugins and scripts available to monitor your needs, Nagios’ the interface and user friendliness leaves much to be desired.  Plus you have to maintain and monitor another server to store and analyze the data provided through your Nagios plugins and scripts.  And worst of all, if your Nagios server or network fail – you may not get an alert at all when you need them the most.

A hosted system monitor gathering your stats is a good way to ensure that alerts get to you, and having it have nice tools and interfaces is definitely a bonus.  Monitis is a hosted systems and networks monitoring solution that offers a simple user interface, with powerful tools, and a distributed network to prevent any service failures  blocking your alerts.  It will free up your sysadmins from monitoring their monitoring servers, and will allow them to focus on the issues rather than looking for the issues.

Monitis provides you with the ability to monitor almost any detail on your Windows server (also see our post How to Monitor Windows Servers with VBScript, WMI and Monitis).

Using a simple Visual Basic Script (VBS), you will be able to read the value of any Performance Counter on your Windows Server and send it to a Custom Monitor.

It’s easy as pie. Keep reading for the recipe!

Want to track a certain metric on your server which is not available out-of-the-box?  The Monitis monitoring platform provides you with the ability to monitor almost anything you can think of, including any detail on your Windows servers. Using a simple Visual Basic Script (VBS or vbscript) you will be able to read any value from WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) and send it to Monitis’s platform for visualization, tracking and alerting — using our so-called Custom Monitoring feature.

About WMI Service

WMI is a core Windows management technology that allows software to monitor and control managed resources throughout a network. WMI gives you a consistent way to access almost any detail of the operating system (OS) such as hardware, devices, services and applications.

Did you know that you can download monitoring agents from Monitis that check the health of your servers, networks and applications — regardless of whether your firewall is up and running? In fact, these agents (which work for all operating systems) are such a convenience for so many sysadmins and website masters that Monitis has just published a new whitepaper — “Monitis Internal Monitoring Agent: Security and Performance” — to explain the workings behind the technology.

The whitepaper, which can be downloaded free from Monitis’s portal, discusses how these agents deliver the monitoring results in real-time to the Monitis Main Server, to be further displayed via Monitis’s web-based dashboard. The information — sometimes not so good, as in, a site is down — also triggers warnings and critical alerts through a whole menu of notifications, for example, email, mobile phone, SMS, IMs, Twitter and URL callback.