Windows Home Server Event Monitor
Download latest 01 Dec 2007
Comments and Suggestions
Why
I started this project because I don't like to pay attention to
servers. MY WHS box does not even have a video card in it. I
just want to throw it in a closet and forget all about it. Also,
because my WHS is installed on a
pretty cheap box it generates lots of
noise.
What
I started with the idea that all I wanted was for my WHS to tell me
when something was awry. Monitoring the event logs seemed to be a
logical place to start. I spoke about it with my friend
Brian and he had some great insight. Base requirements were:
- Runs as an NT service and chews up little or no CPU.
- Uses Regex for
event pattern matching.
- Can aggregate events collected onto single Emails sent at a
fixed frequency.
- Can coalesce events so that if you get spammed with 1 type, you
will only see the first one and a count in the Email.
- Some events you want forwarded immediately (e.g. remote login
failures).
- I wanted some sort of UI Host that would allow me to test the
system independent of WHS.
How
Easy: Visual Studio 2005 and the very minimal
Windows
Home Server SDK. The docs for the SDK kind of suck but once
you sort out how to name things, its pretty straight forward.
The event monitor will also install on any machine which is not a
WHS. You would then use UIHost.exe to configure it. The
system installs in the following directories:
- WHS Add-In: C:\Program Files\Windows Home Server
- NT Monitoring Service: C:\Program Files\davemercer.org\WHS Event
Service
- The UIHost: C:\Program Files\davemercer.org\WHS Event Service
Would you like to try it?
This is a V0.9 Beta quality implementation. I want to get some
miles on it and find out where it breaks. Feel free to provide
feedback. You can get it from the
Download Latest link at the top of this page.
Feedback
I'd really love some feedback.
Please provide comments, suggestions and bug reports. If you
provide your Email, I'll get back to you.
Next Steps
Some of the things I plan on adding include:
-
WHS
Health Event Monitoring (see the blank real estate on the right
side of the console).
- S.M.A.R.T
Monitoring of the disks. I'm particularly interested in disk
temperatures and predicted time to failure.
Note to Windows Vista users:
To run the event monitor on a Vista box you may have to do some messing
with privileges. The Service runs as NetworkServiceAccount and you
may have to change this to run as an elevated user. Also, when you
run the UIHost you will probably have to Run As Administrator.