Let’s turn to server monitoring, a topic often overlooked. You can avoid many issues by identifying problems early on!
Understand Windows Server Automatic Monitoring
Microsoft has gone to great lengths with its GUI, particularly when it comes to the Server Manager, which is where you’ll need to head for server monitoring! So there you go, course over, thank you—only joking—let’s take a proper look at the topic.
Let’s analyze this automatic monitoring. First, go to your dashboard, which you should be pretty familiar with by now:
Remember, the quick-access menu is on the left, the actual dashboard is in the middle (with a quick start zone and monitoring elements), and the menu with notifications (signaled with a flag) is at the top right.
Look at the left-hand menu first. You can use this to go to a server, role, or server group quickly:
Let’s stick with the Local Server for now.
I won’t go back over the first section where you’ll find all of the basic server configuration (network, name, update status, etc.). Instead, below are events from the different logs in your server.
Monitor Events on Your Server
By default, Critical, Error, and Warning events are displayed in logs:
The Services section is under the Events section:
Here you’ll find the status of all of the services on your server! You can restart, stop, or boot a service directly from this zone by right-clicking on the service name.
Check You’re In Line with Microsoft Best Practices
Next, is the Best Practices Analyzer:
This is a helpful tool for monitoring a server. For example, I’ve installed the DHCP role on my server. To find out if my configuration aligns with Microsoft’s best-practice guides, I launch the Best Practices Analyzer (BPA) from Tasks and then Start BPA Analysis. Here’s the result:
In just the blink of an eye (or click of a mouse), I know that my DHCP role is not correctly configured and cannot operate! It’s now up to me (or you) to make the suggested modifications.
Monitor Your Server’s Performance
You’ll find the Performance section under BPA:
Though rarely used, it’s a powerful tool for diagnosing a resource issue on your server. To enable it, click on Tasks and then Configure Performance Alerts:
In this example, you’ll get an alert in this area when CPU utilization is above 85%, and there are fewer than 100 MB of RAM available. This alert will prompt you to look into the issue and resolve it.
Right-click on the server and then Start Performance Counters to run the analysis. All that’s left to do is wait for the data and any potential performance alerts:
Now that you know how to identify performance issues on your server, it’s up to you to investigate them, discover the source, and resolve the problem.
Stay on Top of Roles and Features
Finally, you have a summary of the roles and features installed on your server:
This is a quick and easy way to see what roles and features you have installed. And now you know how to monitor your server using Microsoft tools!
Let’s Recap!
Windows Server comes with various monitoring tools ready-installed.
A dashboard is available for your local server and a server group.
The BPA (Best Practices Analyzer) lets you check that you are abiding by Microsoft’s best practices for configuration.
We’ve reached the end of part 1, where you saw how the Windows Server system works. In the next part, you’ll use this knowledge to install and configure different network services.
In the meantime, I suggest you test your knowledge with the end-of-part quiz!
