Jean-Baptiste Emeriau

W-SrvMon is a gadget for Vista sidebar. It helps to keep an eye on one or several remote computers. This gadget uses WMI to retrieve information, so remote WMI access has to be enabled on remote server and accessible for remote connections.

The gadget is able to monitor several services' states and free logical disks spaces per server. First it determines whether the remote server is online or not. For this gadget, "online" means that your workstation is able to reach the remote machine concerned (I use the "StatusCode" property of the WMI Win32_PingStatus class).

W-SrvMon_1.0.0.0.zip (28 ko)

First public release (version 1.0.0.0) is now available!
I'm waiting for user feedback, so feel free to spread this gadget around the world. I just ask you to link to this website and not directly to the gadget. If you want, you can leave a comment at the end of this page.

Features :

Details:

First choose desired refresh time. Then write a machine name in the server's field. If you click on the "..." button the program will test the presence of the machine you put in the server field (WMI ping). If this computer is accessible over the network, server field becomes green otherwise it becomes red. A click on the ">>" button will add server field's content to the dropdown list just below. With "X" button you can delete selected server.

Then choose the server's type between "Windows" or "Other". For now "Other" choice only permits to perform WMI ping test. "Windows" choice offers the ability to perform advanced monitoring over services and disks space. Just enter the credentials for selected server and click on the "..." button. If credentials are corrects, the corresponding field will become green and services and logical disks will appear in their respective list. Otherwise the field will become red and no services or logical disks will be listed.

Finally, choose desired services and click the ">>" button to move it from the left list to the right one. If you want to delete a previously chosen item, just select it in the right list and click the "<<" button, it will come back to the left list. Do the same for logical disks, and enter a quota alert.

Repeat all these operations for each server you plan to monitor and finally click the "OK" button. Your settings will be saved and the servers you choosed to be monitored, will appear on the sidebar.

*In Windows Vista, all the settings of all the widgets will be stored in a text file (%userprofile%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Sidebar\Settings.ini), and this is not a very secure way. So, concerning credentials, I decided to encrypt them before storing them in the file Setting.ini. I use a method inspired by the Vigénère algorithm. The private encryption key is extracted from some data of the local computer.

Version history:

Comments (17)

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written by Ayyanar , novembre 05, 2009

This is a great tool! congrats to you.

It works gr8. If there is any '-' or ipaddress it doesnt work. So add a shortname in Hosts file and use that name.

Looking the following features. If these are added, then this will be a Good Tool for the Network Admins.

1. Sound for Failure
2. Bigger Size
3. Short Description for the Server
4. ReOrdering
5. Export the Configuration to Text File and Import the Same.
6. Unix Support
7. Services Search

Anyway thanks a Lot

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Awesome monitor
written by Pål , novembre 03, 2009

This is a great tool!

I am sad to see it has not been updated since 1.0 though, and I hope it will be maintained and refined.

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Suggestion
written by mike jarvis , septembre 18, 2009

It would be a lot more useful if this had an audio alert feature so that you could pick a sound to associate with servers that went offline.

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Suggestion
written by Yong Sun Yong , août 31, 2009

I wish to see the server name can be display according.

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IT Admin
written by Jeff Davis , août 27, 2009

Great tool, however it would be better if you could expand the gadget to a wider size so it doesn't cut off the computer name.

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Fixed it!
written by Andrew , juin 30, 2009

Never mind - I have used the server name instead of the IP address and it all works now. Strange though. perhaps it's a function of the server name and password?
Merci pour cet instrument très utile.
Andrew.

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Looks like this will be very useful, but...
written by Andrew , juin 30, 2009

I'm having the same problem as TW, above. Gadget installs OK, and can ping server, but I cannot see any services or drives to monitor. I've tried shuting off the firewall, but no go. Any suggestions, please?. Andrew.

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Nice Program
written by T.Warden , mai 12, 2009

Nice little app... however, I seem to be having a problem getting it to work. When entering my credentials and clicking on the ..., Nothing happens. No color change, no services or Logical drives, nothing. So just for fun, I put in a bogus password, and again, nothing. Do you have any ideas?

Tim

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Server Name Bug
written by J Vorbeck , avril 14, 2009

Hi, This is a great gadget. Thank you very much. There is a problem with server names with a Hyphen (-) in the name [server-name]. When you provide the login credentials on those servers to view the services, you get a runtime error.

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IS Manager
written by Doug Williams , avril 03, 2009

Great utility! Be even better if we could rearrange the order of the machines and have a bigger fields to see more info.

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...
written by FredBeagle , décembre 29, 2008

Great job this little gadget works great

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Deleting a server
written by Thomas Petersen , décembre 24, 2008

removes it from gadget but leaves settings in settings.ini
so if you would like to add it again it uses that old settings

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...
written by N Caballero , novembre 13, 2008

First of all, one in a million. Great job.

How exactly should I configure our servers so we can monitor the services and hard drives? It works perfectly in the intranet but I'm not sure what ports I should route to allow for monitoring remotely. Or is it a different protocol?

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Don't work with me
written by Ricardo , octobre 31, 2008

I got errors.

When add a server i got errors in line 79

The object don't supports this metod and a lot of others problens

The ideia of the gadgets is very good

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Services/Drive Space don't appear
written by P Savitz , octobre 20, 2008

I can't get services or drive space fields to populate.

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Great Job
written by D Williams , septembre 22, 2008

Excellent Gadjet. I have been looking for something like this for some time. I especially like that you can set it to monitor specific processes and not just ping. The hard drive utilization is great too.

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Alert Display
written by T Anderson , septembre 09, 2008

Hi, firstly congrats on a good gadget. Just a thought for the next release though - it would be good to have a 'minimised' display mode when docked in the sidebar which showed just the failures or a message saying all is OK if no failures existed. With more gadgets about and sidebar real-estate becoming more and more congested a summary view like this would be most useful...thanks again, Tony

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