processes

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Does anyone have any experience with monitoring Windows Processes?
I’ve checked the community for datasources and I don’t see anything to what I’m specifically looking for. Our organization currently utilizes the Microsoft_Windows_Services datasource (modified a little bit for our specific needs) to monitor services. I’m looking for something similar to monitor windows processes. Similar to the Microsoft_Windows_Services datasource, what I am hoping to accomplish is provide a list of keywords that will either match or be contained in the process name that I want to monitor, provide a list of machines that I want to monitor those processes on, and then get alerted on if those processes stop running. Some issues I am running into so far are: Win32_Process always returns a value of NULL for status and state. So I cannot monitor for those two class level properties. Powershell’s Get-Process does not return status or state, rather it just looks for processes that are actively running, so I would need to get creative in having LogicMonitor create the instance and what value to monitor in the instance. Some of the processes I want to monitor create multiple processes with the same name, and LogicMonitor then groups them all together into one instance, which makes monitoring diffucult. Some of the process I want to monitor are processes that only run if an application is manually launched, which means that again I will need to get creative in how I set up monitoring because I don’t want to get alerts when a process that I know shouldn’t be running is not running. Because the processes I am trying to monitor are not going to be common for everyone everywhere, something that other people could do to try to replicate my scenario would be: Open Chrome. When Chrome is launched, you will get a processed called “Chrome”. Now, open several other tabs of Chrome, you will just get more processes named “Chrome”. Now, keeping in mind the points I made earlier, set up monitoring to let you know when the 3rd tab in Chrome has been closed, even though the rest of the Chrome tabs are still open. How would you break that down? My first thought would be to monitor the PIDs, however, when you reboot your machine, your PIDs will likely change. Also, I don’t want to have the datasource wild value search by PID, because that would get confusing really fast once you have 2 or 3 different PIDs that you want to monitor. All suggestions are welcome, and any help is greatly appreciated. Bonus points if you can get this to work with the discovery method as Script and you use an embedded Groovy or Powershell script.
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eleaman
2 years ago Place LM Exchange
608Views
12likes
19Comments
Datasource to monitor Windows Services/Processes automatically?
Hello, We recently cloned 2 Logic Monitor out of the box datasources (name -> WinService- & WinProcessStats-) in order to enable the 'Active Discovery' feature on those. We did this because we've the need to discover services/processes automatically, since we don't have an 'exact list' of which services/processes we should monitor (due to the amount of clients [+100] & the different services/solutions across them) After enabling this it works fine & does what we expect (discovers all the services/processes running in each box), we further added some filters in the active discovery for the services in order to exclude common 'noisy' services & grab only the ones set to automatically start with the system. Our problem arrives when these 2 specific datasource start to impact the collector performance (due to the huge amount of wmi.queries), it starts to reflect on a huge consumption of CPU (putting that on almost 100% usage all the time) & that further leads to the decrease of the collector performance & data collection (resulting in request timeouts & full WMI queues). We also thought on creating 2 datasources (services/processes) for each client (with filters to grab critical/wanted processes/services for the client in question) but that's a nightmare (specially when you've clients installing applications without any notice & expecting us to automatically grab & monitor those). Example of 1 of our scenarios (1 of our clients): - Collector is a Windows VM (VMWare) & has 8GB of RAM with 4 allocated virtual processors (host processor is a Intel Xeon E5-2698 v3 @ 2.30Ghz) - Currently, it monitors 78 Windows servers (not including the collector) & those 2 datasource are creating 12 700 instances (4513 - services | 8187 - processes) - examples below This results in approx. 15 requests per second This results in approx. 45 requests per second According to the collector capacity document (ref. Medium Collector) we are below the limits (for WMI), however, those 2 datasource are contributing A LOT to make the queues full. We're finding errors in a regular basis - example below To sum this up, we were seeking for another 'way' of doing the same thing without consuming so much resources on the collector end (due to the amount of simultaneous WMI queries). Not sure if that's possible though. Did anyone had this need in the past & was able to come up with a different solution (not so resource exhaustive)? We're struggling here mainly because we come from a non-agent less solution (which didn't faced this problem due to the individual agent distributed load - per device). Appreciate the help in advance! Thanks,
Vitor_Santos
5 years ago Place Product Discussions
1.4KViews
13likes
37Comments
Count of Windows Processes
I wrote this DataSource for a customer with a specific requirement, namely, they have a particular application that should spawn and maintain a specific number of processes on Windows machines. Operation: The DataSource finds all processes on the Windows machine and groups and counts based on name - e.g. if there are processes powershell, powershell#1, powershell#2, then the powershell instance will be added and will show a count of 3. Out of the box this DataSource will create instances for *all* processes as reported from the Win32_PerfRawData_PerfProc_Process WMI class, except the "Idle" process and the "_Total" metrics. This behaviour is unlikely to be of great benefit; the main use case will involve editing the filters (and cloning the DS as appropriate) such that it only brings back processes you care about (and not, for example, the dozens of svchost processes that will be present on every Windows machine). Also returned are thread count, file handle count, and working set metrics, each being the sum of the per-process metrics. This is possible as these are instantaneous values. Note that unlike the per-process DataSource, CPU metrics cannot be returned. This is because these metrics are returned by WMI as incremental counters and the appearance and disappearance of individual processes between polls would render any sum meaningless. It is however possible to see combined CPU metrics for multiple processes via manipulation of the WinProcessStats- DataSource (clone and filter for the processes you need) and smart graphs with a sum aggregation. v1.0.0 Exchange Locator ID: XHT4MD Example of instances found: Overview graphs: Per-instance graphs:
Antony_Hawkins
7 years ago Place Archive
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