Chapter 24. Monitoring Servers: Using WMI and Performance Monitor

In This Chapter:

• Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI)

• Performance Monitor

• The ServerMonitor Demo Program

Imagine your servers being locked in a room that is 1,200 miles away. You can get to them and administer them through Terminal Services or PC Anywhere, but the firewall won't let you monitor them from your handheld, wireless PDA. It's important, though, that at any time of day or night you can see important statistics about the servers. The health of your servers is vital to business.

The things you might want to see include available disk space, available memory, average CPU utilization, and maybe some custom application statistics. All of these details are available to ASP.NET applications through some base classes that exist in the .NET Framework. That means that your handheld, wireless device can view the server's vital signs through an ASP.NET application, thus avoiding the problem that the firewall poses.

This chapter talks about Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) and Performance Monitor, and shows how to use both through a special demonstration application. The underlying technology is presented along with explanatory code snippets, followed by a complete application.