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Posted on April 3rd, 2012
I’ve recently had a couple customers ask me about dependencies. This is a relatively new feature in Overseer, so some of our existing customers don’t even know exactly how to use them. They are rather hidden, but will become more visible in the next major version of Overseer. While hidden, resource dependencies can be very powerful in controlling excessive notifications when a single point of failure goes down, such as an internet connection.
Overseer lets you specify multiple dependencies, although often times this will just be one– such as an internet connection or pinging a server before attempting to monitor Windows event logs, services, disk space, websites, etc.
To setup a dependency, first click the ‘Advanced’ button on the resource dialog:
This will bring up a dialog that lets you add and remove dependencies:
On this screen, click the ‘Add’ button to add a dependency or ‘Delete’ to delete one. You can also select the “Send notifications on dependency failures” setting. When this is checked, Overseer will send a notification to the user when the resource dependency fails. For example, the resource in this example is “Microsoft’s Website”. Overseer will first check the status of the configured ‘Local Gateway’ dependent resource, and if it is down, it will normally not check or send notifications for “Microsoft’s Website” being down– it will simply go to ‘Failure’ status silently instead– ideally so you can get one notification that “Local Gateway” is down, instead of dozens that other resources that depend on it are down as well. However, if this checkbox is checked, notifications will be sent about “Microsoft’s Website” being down when Overseer determines that the “Local Gateway” dependent resource is down.
When clicking ‘Add’ on the resource dependencies screen, you’re presented with this dialog:
This dialog lets you find a resource more easily by filtering– by name, type, and resource group. Once you find the one you’d like, simply double-click it, or select it in the grid and click ‘Select’.
Posted on March 15th, 2012
Sometimes Overseer customers will Email me and tell me that Overseer notifies them that their server is down, yet they login and everything is fine. This is something that will occur from time to time– Overseer detects a failure, but this may be caused by a network hiccup(particularly over WAN connections), or occasionally an OS issue. The first thing to do, is obviously investigate by looking at event logs, do some basic network tests(ping [host] -t to look for packet loss), etc.
However, even if something is found, it’s possible that there’s nothing you can do about it right away– but you really don’t want to be bothered by Overseer. Thankfully, there’s a feature in Overseer created just for this purpose. Simply edit the schedule for the resources in question and edit the ‘After resource has been down’ setting, as shown in this image:
Now, Overseer will wait 15 minutes before sending the first notification. So, when Overseer is checking resources using this schedule, if it fails it will see it’s been down 0 minutes, and wait. 5 minutes later, it will check again– if it’s still down, it will be down 5 minutes– which is also less than 15. It will wait until it hits that 15 minute mark(as configured above), and once it does, it will notify the administrators.
Posted on September 23rd, 2011
Overseer generally maintains its own database and doesn’t bloat significantly larger than it needs to be to hold your data. However, in some limited situations, it may be beneficial to compact the database if it gets quite large for some reason. This function should be built into Overseer at a future time, but for now it can be done with this manual process:
- Download the Windows command line shell tool from http://www.sqlite.org/download.html (currently labeled ‘sqlite-shell-win32-x86-3070800.zip’, but that will change as new versions are released)
- Extract the contents of the above zip file to your c:\Program Files\Overseer 4\Data\ directory(assuming default paths)
- Make sure Overseer is closed
- Launch a command shell by going to Start->Run and typing ‘cmd’ and pressing enter.
- Type the following commands:
cd "\program files\overseer 4\data"
net stop overseersvc
sqlite3 overseer4config.db vacuum
sqlite3 overseer4data.db vacuum
- Now, you can close the command window and re-start Overseer, which will automatically prompt to restart the service.
If you have any questions or anything doesn’t go as described here, please contact support using the support link above.
Thanks.
Posted on May 25th, 2011
Some customers have asked me how to get Overseer Network Monitoring Software to Email them a notification when a server restarts for some reason. While Overseer does not provide this functionality directly, this is possible with a simple event log resource in Overseer, as Windows logs a specific event entry when the server restarts.
To setup an event log resource to monitor when a server restarts, create a new event log resource, set the machine name to the server you wish to monitor, set the appropriate password, and choose “System” as the log name. Double click the default Event Filter and change it to include only event ID 6009 for the ‘eventlog’ resource. You can also click ‘Set Custom Notification Text’ to set a custom text indicating to you that the server has rebooted. Click ‘Test’, and you’ll see a message box with your message, indicating the last time your server was restarted(assuming you keep ‘%TIME%’ in your custom text).
Now, when your server reboots, everyone in the associated notification group will get a notification when the server reboots. If you have any questions or comments, please contact us using the support link above.
Posted on May 24th, 2011
People often ask how to move Overseer Network Monitoring Software from one computer to another– maintaining all their configuration settings, data, etc. This is actually a very easy process.
- Close the Overseer application if you have it running
- Stop the Overseer Service(this can be done in the Services MMC under computer management)
- Navigate to c:\Program Files\Overseer 4\Data\ and copy all the files to a safe location
- Un-install Overseer from this computer
- Install Overseer on the destination computer
- Stop the Overseer service on this destination computer
- Copy the files that were copied out in step#3 above into the same directory on the destination computer
- Start Overseer on the new computer
This should maintain all configuration settings, historical data, etc. You can apply your license by going to Help->License… and entering your license information you received in your original Email.
If you have any questions about this process, please contact us using the support link above. Thanks.
Posted on May 13th, 2011
Multiple Overseer customers over the last few years have sent me Emails where Overseer was returning an error from the system, “Network path is not found”. This is a very common error message returned by Windows, and has a number of potential causes– 100% of the time, this has been a configuration issue in the customer’s environment. If you are receiving this error with our network monitoring software, please use this checklist to try to determine the cause:
- Make sure both computers(Overseer computer and remotely monitored computer) are running on the same LAN, or a WAN without port blocking.
- Make sure the Windows firewall is disabled, or that they are sufficiently opened to facilitate communication between these computers.
- Make sure UAC is disabled. Note that some aspects of UAC may remain enabled, even after turning it off in the GUI.
- Check the times on both computers. Computer clocks must be within 15min of each other, ideally within seconds or less. Be sure to check both the date and time.
- Make sure these services are enabled and running on both computers:
- Remote Registry Service
- Server
- Workstation
- Computer Browser
- Remote Procedure Call
- TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper Service
- Open your network card(s) properties, and make sure these are checked:
- Client for Microsoft Networks
- File and Printer Sharing for Microsoft Networks
- Also make sure “Enable NetBIOS over TCP/IP” is enabled
- Make sure “802.1x” authentication is disabled(potentially buried under ‘configure’ tab for network adapter
If all these things are checked and the error persists, please perform these tasks and contact support with the results:
- Check the system, security, application event logs on both computers for potentially related errors
- Make sure you can connect to the remote computer manually:
- Start->Run and type in \\remotemachine\c$ where remotemachine is the name of that computer
- Use the same credentials as used in Overseer when prompted
- Run ‘regedit’ and attempt to open the remote machine’s registry(File->Connect Network Registry…)
- Create a debug file where you’ve re-created the problem, and include it with your message to support.
Posted on April 15th, 2011
Sometimes when trying to diagnose a problem in Overseer Network Monitor, we will ask customers to enable debug mode. When turned on, Overseer will log a good deal of information to a text file that can be used to determine what is failing where, and how.
To enable debug mode in Overseer, please follow these steps:
- Launch regedit by going to start->run, typing ‘regedit’, and clicking ‘ok’
- Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Sensible Software\Overseer\ in the left pane
- In the right pane, set the ‘LogLevel’ value to 6
- Restart Overseer and the Overseer service
- Re-create the error you’re having or leave debug mode enabled per instructions from support
- Send the files in C:\Program Files\Overseer 4\Data\Logs\ to support. You may have to zip these files to send through Email, or upload via FTP using credentials supplied by support.
- Turn debug mode off by changing the ‘LogLevel’ value above to 0 and restarting Overseer and the Overseer Service.
It is important not to leave debug mode on, as the debug file can grow quite large over time and eventually fill up your hard drive, or otherwise slow Overseer and/or your computer down dealing with a very large text file.
Posted on April 6th, 2011
Windows 2008 R2, and possibly some other later versions of Windows, have a problem with being remotely monitored by non-domain accounts. This blog post will show how to work-around this Windows “feature” that disables such monitoring.
Recent versions of Windows introduced UAC– User Account Control. While this may be useful on some workstations, most server admins will disable it so they don’t spend half their day clicking ‘yes’ on prompts. What many don’t realize, however, is that disabling UAC on the server doesn’t disable “remote UAC”– most people don’t even know such a thing exists…
Well, it does– and it causes remote monitoring tools like Overseer to **not work** when utilizing local accounts. Domain accounts will still work to monitor the computer, but if you’re trying to monitor a W2K8R2 computer that is not a member of a domain(and therefore using local accounts), you may run into this issue. This is further obscured by the fact that this remote UAC does not appear to affect the built-in ‘Administrator’ account– only separate users that should normally be allowed(members of Administrators group).
Well, the solution is here. To disable this ‘Remote UAC’ feature, you can add this DWORD registry value, setting it to 1:
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System\LocalAccountTokenFilterPolicy = 1
No restart of the server or any services is required. Note that this registry change must be done on any servers being monitored by Overseer– not just the computer running Overseer itself.
For convenience, you can use the .reg file below to add this registry key, or you can do it manually using regedit.
DisableRemoteUAC.reg
Posted on March 16th, 2011
Currently, Overseer is primarily purchased on our website via Paypal. We also support purchase orders for those that wish to pay that way. Some people may not want to create a Paypal account, and that’s OK. The shopping cart system lets you pay with a credit card without logging in or creating a Paypal account. Follow these steps to order Overseer without creating a Paypal account:
1. Select the product on the http://www.overseer-network-monitor.com/Pricing.aspx page, and click ‘Purchase’:
2. Next, confirm your information and click ‘Checkout’ on the shopping cart screen:
3. This will present you with a screen that allows you to either login/create a paypal account, or pay with a credit or debit card without creating an account. To do so, click “Don’t have a Paypal account?”
4. This should then bring you to a screen where you simply enter your credit card information and submit your order, as you would in any other shopping cart:
This should allow you to easily purchase Overseer using any valid credit card, and won’t require you to create a Paypal account that may never be used again.
Posted on February 21st, 2011
Recently a customer needed to monitor MSSQL 2008 R2 Express database sizes and be notified when the size grew too large. It is quite easy to monitor SQL Express database size with Overseer Network Monitor’s Database monitoring capabilities.
As you may know, SQL Express 2008R2 is limited to 10GB databases. Older versions, such as SQL Express 2005 and 2008(R1) were limited to only 4GB. This customer needed to be notified when certain databases hit 80% of their allowed size, so they could run an archival process to keep the database size under the database size limit for SQL 2008 Express R2. To do this, we setup a DB Query resource like this for each database that needed monitoring:
We used this SQL query:
SELECT (SUM(used_pages)*8192)/1024 FROM sys.allocation_units
This gets the size of the data+indexes in the current MSSQL Database. We then setup a simple scalar result evaluator to notify if this value exceeded 8,388,608(8GB). Now, whenever the database size grows large, the customer will receive Emails letting him know to run his archival process.
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