Written by David Mytton

I’m pleased to announce that we have started beta testing the Windows agent for our server monitoring service, Server Density. As we did with our Python agent for Linux and OS X, we have written our own C# .NET agent for Windows designed to be as easy to use as possible so you can get the data you need via our web UI and API plus alerts by email, SMS and iPhone.

Details

• Runs as a service on your Windows server reporting to us every 60 seconds.
• Graphical installer takes you through the basic configuration (account URL and server key).
• Full alerting capabilities on all metrics.
• Real time data on the dashboard, data graphed by date range and server snapshot to view full process list + resource usage for any point in time.
• Anomaly detection for certain metrics.
• Complete support in our iPhone application, including push notification alerting.

You essentially get all the same features as for our Linux / OS X agent, but on Windows!

Metrics

As standard, the Windows agent will report back:

• CPU utilisation (%)
• Process count
• Physical memory (used, cached and free)
• Paged memory (used, free)
• Disk usage
• Network traffic
• IIS requests per second

Plugins

As with the Linux / OS X agent, you can write your own plugins to monitor anything you like. Plugins are written in C# so can make full use of .NET and are compiled so are just as fast as the agent itself.

Full documentation can be found here along with a sample project to help you get started.

Getting onto the beta

The beta will be available to everyone – free, trial and paid. However, we are currently restricting access. We’ll be e-mailing users who have already requested access and/or requested Windows in the past. We want to get feedback to do a few beta releases before general availability so if you’d like to try it out, just e-mail us and we’ll put you on the list.

What OSs does it support?

We support Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 (all editions including 64 bit). The only requirement is .NET 2.0 SP1 framework or above.

How much does it cost?

Servers you add will be charged at our normal pricing: £7 GBP (~$10 USD) per server per month. It will be available to free users under the normal restrictions of that package. Feel free to sign up to a new trial account if you want to give it a go once you’re invited to the beta.

Will the agent be open source?

Yes. We have a Github project waiting but if we open source it now, we won’t be able to control the beta as anyone can download the code and build it! Once we release the stable version it will be maintained via Github under the same FreeBSD license as the Linux / OS X agent.

Questions

We’re pretty excited about this release so let us know if you have any questions.

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