About performance monitoring

Endpoint Manager provides several methods for monitoring a device's health status. While alert rulesets are defined at the core console and deployed to multiple devices, on individual devices you can also define performance monitoring counters to monitor specific performance issues.

You can define performance counters and monitor them for various kinds of data on your devices, such as:

  • Hardware components (such as drives, processors, and memory)
  • Hardware sensors (such as fans, voltages, and temperatures)
  • OS components (such as processes and services)
  • Application components (such as bytes per second transferred by the system's Web server)
  • Usage levels

When you select a performance counter you also specify the frequency for polling the item, as well as specify the performance thresholds and number of violations that are allowed before an alert is generated. After you define a performance counter, you can then open the Monitoring page in the Real-time inventory and monitoring console and view a summary of your monitored alerts.

In order to be alerted for performance monitor items on a device, you must include a Performance monitor rule in the ruleset for that device.

Process for monitoring performance items on devices

To monitor performance of various items on your managed devices, complete the following three general tasks:

Notes
  • If you want to simply ping devices regularly to monitor their connectivity, use the device monitor feature.
  • Communications to the monitoring agent are via HTTP over TCP/IP in the form of GET or POST requests. Responses to requests are in XML documents.
  • When you run and store a query on the health status of devices (Computer.Health.State), the state in the database is represented by a number. The numbers correspond to the following states: 4=Critical, 3=Warning, 2=Normal, 1=Informational, null or 0=unknown.
  • Hardware monitoring is dependent on the capabilities of the hardware installed on a device, as well as on the correct configuration of the hardware. For example, if a hard drive with S.M.A.R.T. monitoring capabilities is installed on a device but S.M.A.R.T. detection is not enabled in the device's BIOS settings, or if the device's BIOS does not support S.M.A.R.T. drives, monitoring data will not be available.
  • If reporting from a specific machine appears to have stopped, you can use restartmon.exe in the LDCLIENT folder to restart the collector and all monitoring providers. This utility is for machines on which reporting has been installed, and reporting has stopped. Use this utility to restart the collector and providers without having to reboot the device.