Need a System Sentinel? Try JFFNMS

Graphs and Stats
After JFFNMS detects the available drives on your system, it automatically starts collecting and graphing metrics that administrators typically want to view over time—for example, CPU utilization, network utilization, number of processes in memory, and TCP connections. To view graphs for a particular interface, go to the graphical view of the interfaces for a host by selecting Administration, Hosts & Interfaces, Hosts, then click an interface icon such as a disk drive, CPU, or network interface. Doing so displays the JFFNMS graphing engine that lets you view historical utilization data, as Web Figure 1 at http://www.windowsitpro.com, InstantDoc ID 44985, shows. Here, I'm viewing CPU utilization for another test system on my network. You can change the chart to plot different types of data that are logged for this interface by selecting different options in the Graph Type list at the upper left of the graph or change the time value that's displayed by selecting a Time Preset value in the drop-down list at the upper right.

If you want to view several charts on one page, click Administration, Reports, Performance Graphs. Here, you can display multiple charts for all your monitored devices, which provides a great at-a-glance view of your environment. I've found that using this charting over a long period of time for all my monitored devices can be extremely helpful in diagnosing problems. The charts are also useful for real-time troubleshooting and monitoring, when you narrow the Time Preset value down to the last hour or so. Because the charts are updated continuously (approximately every 2 minutes), they're also valuable for remotely checking utilization on a remote host.

JFFNMS tracks successful and failed port connections and can generate availability reports from these statistics. Were your systems up 100 percent of the time or only 80 percent? You can quickly produce a State & Availability report that provides the answer. To access availability statistics, on the Hosts Administration page select Administration, Reports, State & Availability. Select a host, a customer, or another item for which you want availability statistics. You'll see a report similar to that in Web Figure 2. As you can see, the HTTP service for one of my servers was offline for 3 minutes and 57 seconds, thus dropping that service's availability to 99.863 percent.

Monitoring Service and Process Status
Another useful thing you can do with JFFNMS is to configure it to query a target system and make sure that a process is always found in memory. If you must keep a close eye on critical services within your network, you'll love this feature of JFFNMS.

The SNMP data that's available on any Windows server includes a listing of the current processes residing in memory at the time of the query. The processes are typically referred to by their executable names or their short service names. For example, you'd expect to find inetinfo.exe as one of the processes on a server running IIS or store.exe on a server running Exchange Server. By default, JFFNMS doesn't monitor these processes for you as a part of the "automagic" autodiscovery, so you'll need to define them individually.

You can do so by performing a manual discovery on the host whose processes you want to monitor, then selecting the appropriate processes from the list that's displayed. Select Administration, Hosts and Interfaces, Hosts. Next to the device you want to start working with, click the Manual Discovery link to start the enumeration process, which takes several minutes.

When JFFNMS returns the discovery results, scroll to the bottom of the manual discovery details and you should see a list of processes that are running on your system. Processes here can be system services, or desktop and system tray applications that are currently executing in memory (yes, you can have JFFNMS monitor notepad.exe to make sure it's always running). Find the process(es) you want to monitor and select the Action check box next to the process name, which causes JFFNMS to look for this process on your system whenever it polls the device. If JFFNMS doesn't find the process, it generates a red alert for that device until it finds the process again.

When you're comfortable with JFFNMS and understand how to tune the monitors to minimize noise (alerts that aren't really relevant or important), you'll probably want to have JFFNMS notify you only when something important occurs on your network. JFFNMS users can set up their own email notification addresses by modifying their profile details (select Profile, Profile Values). Edit the eMail value to include the email address to which you want notifications delivered. Keep in mind that email messages will be sent through PHP. Therefore, to use JFFNMS's email notification, you must have correctly defined the mail server to use in the php.ini file when you installed JFFNMS.

Great Monitoring, Great Price
As you've seen, JFFNMS can be quite useful for monitoring an enterprise network of Windows hosts, switches, routers, firewalls, and other devices. Not only does JFFNMS provide many sophisticated monitoring features, it's completely agentless and is easy to implement. I use JFFNMS all the time now to monitor my own systems and those of my clients and look forward to more improvements in this open-source package as it continues to mature.

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