Monitoring

This article explains how to set up a Grafana dashboard to monitor restic/resticprofile backup operations. This post is part of my series on home automation, networking & self-hosting that shows how to install, configure, and run a home server with (dockerized or virtualized) services such as Home Assistant and ownCloud.

This article explains how to set up Grafana, Loki, and Promtail with automatic HTTPS certificates (via Caddy) and OAuth single sign-on (via Authelia). This post is part of my series on home automation, networking & self-hosting that shows how to install, configure, and run a home server & network with dockerized or virtualized services.

This post lists the internet communication targets of Adobe Acrobat Reader, Photoshop, and Creative Cloud. This post is a part of my application network connection monitoring series, a group of articles that explain how to analyze the network traffic of any Windows or macOS app.

This post lists the internet communication targets of Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktops (formerly XenApp/XenDesktop). This post is a part of my application network connection monitoring series, a group of articles that explain how to analyze the network traffic of any Windows or macOS app.

This post lists the internet communication targets of the Microsoft Windows operating system, including its various services and UWP apps. This post is a part of my application network connection monitoring series, a group of articles that explain how to analyze the network traffic of any Windows or macOS app.

This post lists the internet communication targets of Microsoft Office and Teams. It is a part of my application network connection monitoring series, a group of articles that explain how to analyze the network traffic of any Windows or macOS app.

This is part 1 of my application network connection monitoring series, a group of articles that explain how to analyze the network traffic of any Windows or macOS app. The communication targets of the Windows OS and of many popular apps are listed in dedicated posts.

Tools that monitor network traffic typically work with IP addresses, not server names. Humans, on the other hand, seem to prefer names over cryptic numbers. Most tools deal with that by doing reverse lookups of the IP addresses, i.e. they are looking for DNS PTR records. The result of such a lookup, however, is not always what you expect. Let us look at a simple example:

You have been there: end-users are complaining and your boss demands an explanation why “Citrix is slow” - again. You, the XenApp/XenDesktop admin, desperately look at Task Manager and Perfmon, but you cannot find a thing. Your servers are humming along quite nicely, but still: applications are slow, the system feels sluggish and logons are taking forever. And then, all of a sudden, things are back to normal. What was going on? How do you prevent that from happening again?

Whether user profiles are loading slowly or group policy processing is taking too long - uberAgent for Splunk tells you exactly what is causing slow logons. uberAgent always supported a broad range of platforms, from physical PCs through virtual desktops to Citrix XenApp. Today we add RES Workspace Manager to that list!

Analyzing slow boots is a difficult task. You need to install software like XPerf and master its far-from-intuitive command-line options to generate a trace file that you can then analyze. Once you find a possible cause for the long startup duration you never know if it is specific to the machine you analyzed or if it affects other PCs, too. In other words: XPerf, although powerful, is difficult to master. And it does not scale. uberAgent does. And it is super-easy to use.

uberAgent has been pretty good at monitoring applications for some time. It is capable of auto-grouping processes to applications and showing IOPS and other stats per application in addition to per process. All this gets even better today: beta 2, available now, adds application usage metering to the feature list.

Who said that end users get all the pretty UIs? Administrators are as happy as anyone to replace ugly consoles with good-looking HTML5 that runs on a smartphone just as well as on a PC.

uberAgent for Splunk monitors Windows machines. It does not try to display as much data as possible but focuses on visualizing what is actually going on instead. In the last post we gave you a glimpse of the information it can display about user sessions and logon times. Today we are going to talk about machines, processes and applications.

uberAgent for Splunk takes Windows monitoring a step further. uberAgent does not just collect data - it gives you the information that matters. Other monitoring products rely on the performance counters built into Windows. uberAgent has its own metrics, covering key aspects of user experience and system performance.

DiskLED is a small tool that displays performance counter data using an animated system tray icon. The new version 1.1 comes with a graphical configuration dialog that lets you choose from all performance counters available on the local system - you can monitor network throughput just as easily as hard disk activity or memory usage. In this article, I am going to show you how to do that.

What do you do when your computer reacts sluggishly to even the simplest commands? You probably look at its hard disk LED to determine if the disk is busy, because if it is, the only thing that really helps is waiting (apart from buying a faster disk or SSD). Problem solved - if you are sitting right next to the machine. But what if you are using a protocol like RDP or ICA to connect to a remote computer or VM? No HDD LED, no quick and simple way to check for hard drive activity. This has been bugging me enough to write a software replacement: DiskLED.