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Monitor Your Systems Easily
Use free tools from Microsoft to monitor your systems and make sure they are running properly.
by Danielle Ruest and Nelson Ruest
Posted January 13, 2004
For This Solution: Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit, Microsoft Operations Manager Resource Kit
Q: We've got a new manager, and she wants us to begin producing uptime reports from each of our network servers as part of her new approach to systems management. Is there a simple way to do this? We're especially interested in an approach that doesn't require us to purchase new commercial tools.
A:
Danielle: You might not think so right now, but your manager has a great idea. Generating uptime reports might not have been exciting in a Windows NT network because you were constantly rebooting servers. But uptime reports can have a significant impact on how you manage your systems in a Windows Server 2003 environment because this operating system typically runs on and on. Microsoft removed more than 75 reboot situations from Windows 2000, and it removed even more from Windows Server. Now, the only time you need to reboot servers is when you have to apply security patches to them. Fortunately, you can chain security patches to make sure they don't require multiple reboots. Microsoft is working to reduce the complexity of patch management and streamline their application within the near future, so this situation might change.
Nevertheless, your reports should show increased stability from your servers running Windows Server 2003. We recommend generating uptime reports once a week. There are many commercial tools that generate these reports automatically, but with a little ingenuity and some new command-line tools found in Windows Server, you can create your own uptime report generator and have it run automatically each week.
You need to work with three items: a command file containing your uptime report generation commands, a tool to generate the report itself, and a scheduled task to run your command file each week.
The tool you should use depends on how much detail you want to include in the report. Windows Server includes built-in commands for this, but there are also tools available in the Windows Server Resource Kit.
Uptime reports help you track the status of your servers and identify which configurations, both at the software and the hardware level, work best in your environment.
Nelson: As Danielle pointed out, you can use any of several tools to generate an uptime report. You can find one in the Windows Server's command-line tools: systeminfo. This command gives you information on the server you are examining, as well as how long it has been running. You can run this command remotely, but it requires a username and password. The user must have the right to log on locally to the machine to execute the command. The syntax to use this command is simple:
systeminfo /s servername /u
username /p password
/fo TABLE >filename.txt
Servername is the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of the server you want the report from, and username is the name of the account with rights to the server—be sure to use the domain/username format—and password is the account's password. The last switch, /fo, tells the command how to format the output. You can format this output as a table, a list, or as comma-separated values (csv) . List is the default, but the table format works best if you want to generate a report that lets you find the system uptime easily. You can import the resulting table into Microsoft Excel for easier viewing. In this case, you'll find the uptime information in column K. You'll also see that systeminfo generates a lot more information about each system than just the uptime results.
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