Windows Memory Pool Plug-in Monitor

by Feb 13, 2008

Windows Memory Pool Plug-In Monitor

Purpose

Monitors the paged and non-paged memory pool performance on Windows servers.

Description

This plug-in monitor helps you assess your Windows memory usage by providing a count of memory pool statistics:

  • Memory Pool Paged Bytes
  • Memory Pool Non-Paged Bytes

These counts can be used for both alerts and reports.

Requirements

Monitoring station
up.time version – v4 or greater
Dependencies – Perl

Agent system
Platform – Windows
Agent version – v4 or greater
Dependencies – Perl

Installation

Windows

  • Install the downloaded plug-in monitor using loadpluginmonitor.exe

On the command line, run loadpluginmonitor.exe (found in the scripts directory), providing the absolute path to the downloaded plug-in monitor.

e.g.: loadpluginmonitor C:Program Filesuptime softwareuptime4scriptswinmempool_windows.zip
or scriptsloadpluginmonitor C:winmempool_windows.zip

Running loadpluginmonitor unarchives the plug-in monitor contents to the appropriate up.time /script and /xml directories (and if applicable, /agent and /lib directories), and will add the plug-in monitor to the up.time interface (specifically, the Advanced Monitors section of the Add Service Monitor page).

  • Verify that the monitoring station Perl environment variable is set to c:perlbin
    The plug-in monitor scripts assume that a Perl interpreter is located at, and the PERLDIR environment variable is set to, c:perl. If Perl is not found at this location, you must either install it there, or modify the PERLDIR path value in the winmempool.bat file so that it points to the actual Perl interpreter location.
    Since all plug-in monitors are written with the assumption that a Perl interpreter is found at c:perl, it is recommended that you install Perl to that location.

UNIX

  • Install the downloaded plug-in monitor using loadpluginmonitor
    On the command line, run loadpluginmonitor (found in the /scripts directory), providing the absolute path to the downloaded plug-in monitor.

e.g.: loadpluginmonitor /usr/local/uptime4/scripts/winmempool_unix.zip
or /scripts/loadpluginmonitor /user/local/winmempool_unix.zip

Running loadpluginmonitor unarchives the plug-in monitor contents into the appropriate up.time /script and /xml directories (and if applicable, /agent and /lib directories), and will add the plug-in monitor to the up.time interface (specifically, the Advanced Monitors section of the Add Service Monitor page).

  • Verify that the monitoring station Perl interpreter is located at usr/bin/perl
    The plug-in monitor scripts assume that a Perl interpreter is located at usr/bin/perl, and will not work otherwise. If Perl is not found at this location, you must either install it there, or modify the path in the winmempool.pl hashbang so that it points to the actual Perl location.
    Since all plug-in monitors are written with the assumption that a Perl interpreter is found at usr/bin/perl, it is recommended that you install Perl to that location.

Next Steps

This plug-in monitor includes an agent-side component that must be installed on the agent system from which data is to be collected.

To install the agent-side component on Windows-based agent systems, perform the following steps:

  1. Locate agent_winmempool_windows.zip on the monitoring station.
    When you unarchived the plug-in monitor using loadpluginmonitor, the agent-side archive was placed in the scriptsWin Pool Memory Monitor directory.
  2. Copy agent_winmempool_windows.zip to the scripts directory on the agent system.
  3. Unarchive the agent-side component into the scripts directory.
  4. Run regedit from the Windows Run command.
  5. Assign a password to the CmdsPassword entry in the following registry key:
    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREuptime softwareup.time agent
  6. To the same key, add a key and rename it to “rexec_commands”.
  7. To this key, add a string value and name it “winmempool”.
  8. Assign this value to the string:
    cscript /nologo agent_winmempool.vbs.
  9. Open Services from the Administrative Tools Control Panel, and restart the up.time agent.

Configuring the Monitor in up.time

The following configuration settings need to be set when creating a service instance based on this plug-in monitor:

  • Script Name – the name and location (on the monitoring station) of the script that calls the agent-side script, which in turn determines what which Windows Terminal Service counts are collected and sent back to the monitoring station
  • Agent Port – the port through which the up.time monitoring station communicates with the agent
  • Password – the password required to access the up.time agent that is running on the monitored Windows server

At least one of the following configuration settings need to be set when creating a service instance based on this plug-in monitor:

  • Pool Page Bytes – the size, in bytes, of the kernel memory paged pool
  • Pool Non-Paged Bytes – the size, in bytes, of the non-paged pool (i.e., always resident in RAM)