HomeSeer & PC Performance Logging

[Squintz]

I cam across the following site while trying to look for some way to minitor activity using HS. Needless to say when i found this nifty windows feature i got side tracked and now i'm trying to figure out how to put this powerful tool to use with HS.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?...kb;en-us;811237

Read the above How-To before trying to understand anything i say from here on. If you don't im sure i will lose you because im rushing while typing this and im tired.

Using the above steps you can have windows automatically generate logs of just about every performance aspect of your PC. I have tested it using windows XP and it works great. You can save the log file in multiple format inlcuding Text (Comma Delimited AKA Excel Spread Sheet) Text (Tab Delimited AKA Text File). I may have those two confused but i know you can do both text and excel logs. The excel logs a very nice.

I want to find a way to get this information to be available via HS. Maybe not the whole log but perhaps an average of all the numbers for stuff like Network Speed, and the latest number for things like Drive size and memory.

I have just came across this program by accident and want to make the information available so that i can monitor it with HS. Such as if a drive gets to a certain size then warn me. Or if i lose a network conection then warn me. I would also like to make the info available from the HS web server. Doesnt matter how its available as long as it is. The simple status page would work just fine.

Hope i didnt confuse you guys. Take a look at the Performance logger and play with it. Let me know if you can come up with something. Perhaps a script that takes the comma delimited informations and with some calculations loads them into the status of a device.

 

[WayneW]

Before re-inventing the wheel, make sure that UltraJones' UltraMon (on the HS board) and Jon00's CoolMon (on SkiBumsPlace) stuff doesn't already do everything you want.

 

[DavidL]

Jon00 just released a new HS script for SpeedFan. Very easy install and monitors a bunch of stuff. His script is also reading from a csv file so you might be able to modify his script to work with the MS app. Probably quite a bit of work though.

 

[Squintz]

Thanks for pointing out those mods to me. The reason this program jumped out at me is a fact that it does monitor everything i want and everything everyone else wants. I really monitors everything you can think of. So if there were some sort of script that utilized this programs ability to log the information then there wouldnt be a need to install a differnt plugin or script for each thing you wanted to monitor. You could simply pock and chose what "YOU" want only. Plus its built into windows which makes me think its probably the most accurate but i am probably wrong about that.

 

[huggy59]

Monitoring system performance and stats is the province of a protocol named SNMP - Simple Network Management Protocol. Using Windows' performance monitor to generate raw data and coupling that with SNMP, we can pull stats about many aspects of a machine either locally or remotely, and have that info trigger alerts, notifications, run programs, etc. if we set it up correctly.

I use a program called MRTG, which was originally written to capture and graph network router statistics for various running data such as interfaces, throughput, bytes of data, etc. It is written in Perl and runs on Linux, Windows, and most platforms that run Perl. Once set up, MRTG creates graphs of a pair of integer data sets over time. The typical polling interval is 5 minutes, but this can be changed. Also, the graph is somewhat configurable, and there is an alert capability that can run a program or do some task based on a threshold being crossed, in either direction.

This is great for use as a disk space monitoring program, for example. I use it currently for graphing temperature readings from my Midon TEMP05 unit, and line voltage and load stats from my main UPS, but you can feed it just about any integer data or run a program to get that data. (See http://gac.no-ip.com/mrtg ) If you need non-integer data, you can take a look at MRTG's sister package, RRDTool, which is geared toward web graphic displays of floating point data.

Now, using some mostly-free software (SNMP4thePC) that interfaces the Windows PerfMon to it's SNMP implementation allows us to set up just about anything you want to monitor via SNMP (which, by the way, is used in most network management systems like SNMPc, WhatsUpGold, Tivoli, HP OpenView, etc.).

Going further, SNMP interfaces with the Windows Management Interface (WMI) and allows remote management of most aspects of the computer, as well. After all, SNMP was designed to remotely gather, monitor and manage systems over the network. And SNMP is extensible to any program/device that builds in an interface for it.

I know this is probably overkill for what you want, but I wanted everyone to know that there are already very high-level capabilities that can be tapped in Windows and the free open source software out there. It does take setting up quite a bit of software for the groundwork, but in the end you have a flexible, decent, and highly extensible base that can be used for monitoring and/or management of all your PCs.

At my last job I had MRTG and a network management system monitoring file server disk space, switch and router aggregate uplink bandwidth, Internet connection bandwidth, WAN router links and stats, up/down status of all links and systems, and lots of other info. It sent email and pager notifications when something crossed a threshold or went down. It also graphed these stats for historical capture, and generated web pages for executive reports. All automatically with no human intervention. The only program that was commercial was the network management system, SNMPc. Everything else was open source/free. So it can be done.

Maybe someone needs to write an SNMP module for HS?