New Windows Server OS Solution for OMS: Deployment

Have you ever wanted to see the health and performance of all your Windows Server workloads in a single dashboard view?

Lumagate (Stanislav Zhelyazkov) added a new solution to the Azure Marketplace called Windows Server OS Monitoring [Preview]. And the best is: It’s actually at no additional cost and there is no statement, that it will change after leaving the preview state.

This new solution helps you:

• Easily identify and solve performance issues
• See rich Windows Server metrics in an easy-to-digest visual format
• Troubleshoot Windows Server applications
• Monitor Azure virtual machines, virtual machines in other clouds, or on-premises virtual machines

The deployment process is fairly simple.

Before deploying the solution please remove the following data sources from OMS Portal if already existing:

• Windows Event Logs
  • System
  • Application
• Windows Performance Counters
  • Memory(*)\Available MBytes
  • Memory(*)\Free System Page Table Entries
  • Memory(*)\Pages/sec
  • Processor(_Total)\% Processor Time
  • System(*)\Processor Queue Length
  • Memory(*)\% Committed Bytes In Use
  • LogicalDisk(*)\% Free Space
  • LogicalDisk(*)\Current Disk Queue Length
  • LogicalDisk(*)\Disk Transfers/sec
  • LogicalDisk(*)\Avg. Disk sec/Transfer

After cleaning up these data sources, just search for “Windows Server OS Monitoring” or “Lumagate” in the Azure Marketplace or find it under the Monitoring + Management section and add it to your OMS Log Analytics workspace, create or choose your Automation account and define the performance counter ingestion interval (maybe leave it at the default of ten seconds).

For the final configuration it is needed to add two custom fields:

Execute the following steps to create them:

• Login to OMS Portal.
• Click on Log Search tile.
• Execute the following query: (Type=Event) (EventID=7036) Source=”Service Control Manager” and make sure results appear.
• Expand all fields of the first result by clicking show more beneath it.
• Click on the three dots menu next to ParameterXML field and click on Extract fields from ‘Event’.

• From the Extract Field page in the Main Example section select the service name from ParameterXML field as shown in the example. Make sure to select the full name of the service that is located between <Param> and </Param>. For example WMI Performance Adapter, it doesn’t matter which service you take.

• Enter ‘WindowsServiceName_CF’ in Field Title and click Extract.

• Make sure that all service names are correctly shown in Search Results and Summary sections. If some of the results is incorrect click on the edit icon right of the results and correct it.
• When done click Save extraction.
• Repeat the same steps to extract service state from ParameterXML For Field title use ‘WindowsServiceState_CF’.

For more information and configuration options, see the Lumagate blog post, here: http://www.lumagate.com/news/monitoring-windows-os-with-lumagate-and-oms

The full documentation for the solution is here: https://github.com/Lumagate/WindowsServerOSSolutionDocs

Enjoy this Solution and happy OMSsing…