Tips & Tricks - MonitorMagic

2. Software inventory using SNMP

The majority of NT system administrators are primarily concerned with the health and stability of servers, as they are almost always the most important machines in any data driven company. This being the case workstations often receive little attention. As a result end users install and run applications on their workstations that, if they were aware, system administrators would never allow. Standard Windows tools do not provide system administrators with the ability to easily view applications installed on remote Windows 2000 Pro/XP Pro workstations. MonitorMagic tactfully addresses this deficiency, each copy of the product comes with 10 workstation licenses that can be put to use to provide the aforementioned functionality.

To enable MonitorMagic to list applications installed on remote Windows 2000 Professional/XP Professional machines there are prerequisites. The SNMP service must be installed on the machine running the MonitorMagic service and any machine where you want to see a list of installed applications. The procedure for installing the SNMP service is as follows:

1.) Go to the machine, where you would like MonitorMagic to access a list of installed applications, either physically or using a remote control tool such as "Remote Desktop Viewer."
2.) Choose Start/Settings/Control Panel/"Add/Remove Programs"/"Add/Remove Windows Components" The following dialog appears:

3.) Double-click "Management and Monitoring Tools", the following dialog appears:

4.) Choose the "Simple Network Management Protocol" checkbox, click "OK" and complete the wizard. The SNMP service is now installed.

Although it is not a requirement, it is recommend that the MonitorMagic service be installed on each machine you wish to view a list of applications on. Doing so enables you to view the list of applications installed on a machine by double-clicking the machine name itself in MonitorMagic's "Network view." If you opt to use a single service to show the list of applications installed, the display will be confusing. This is because SNMP monitors don't display by machine name, they display by IP address. Many system admins don't know the IP address of every machine, making it difficult to determine, when using a single service, what machine each application is actually installed on. This is not an issue when each machine runs it's own service, that service only displays the list of installed applications for that machine. Please review the MonitorMagic help file for details on installing the MonitorMagic service.

A MonitorMagic policy that provides a list of applications installed on a Windows 2000 Pro/XP Pro machine has already been created and may be downloaded here. Before the policy can be used it must be imported into MonitorMagic. To do so please do the following:

1.) Download the policy, save it to the default policy location which is:
%SYSTEMROOT%:\Program Files\Tools4ever\MonitorMagic\MonitorPolicies
2.) Open the MonitorMagic client and choose the "Policies" tab
3.) Choose either "Central monitor policies" or "Local monitor policies", now choose Policies/Import policies...
4.) Navigate to the path where the policy was saved, select it, and click "OK", the policy now appears in the MonitorMagic client

The policy is called "Software Installed," out of the box it is not ready for use. Two edits need to be made to the policy. Begin editing by expanding the policy so the "Applications Installed on <ENTER MACHINE NAME HERE>" entry is displayed, double-click this entry so the following dialog appears:

Edit the "Name:" field as to replace "<ENTER <MACHINE NAME HERE>" with the name of the machine the policy will be applied to. Now double-click the only entry in the "Specify the SNMP host, Object Identifier and Community to monitor," the following dialog appears:

Change the contents of the "Host address:" field as to replace the current entry with the IP address of the machine you want a list of installed applications on. If your host community is not "public" enter your host community name in the "Host community:" field, click "OK". The policy is now ready to be applied to to the machine you want to view a list of installed applications for. After the policy has been applied and you connect to the service you chose to process the policy, the list of installed applications will appear similar to the following:

***Please be aware that the policy outlined in this article is MACHINE SPECIFIC. If you would like to apply the policy to other machines you will need to copy the monitor, paste it, and edit the pasted copy so it points to a different IP address. Please contact support@tools4ever.com with questions.