PowerShell Probe?

[Anon Anon]

Does Nimsoft plan to add a probe that will let me run PowerShell scripts?

I can run them now, but have to call powershell.exe each time and so creates a new process. This has the downside of needing to load .Net every time which puts quite a load on the server if I'm doing it frequently.

What's needed is a probe that hosts powershell, keeps it open for an extended period of time, and just passes scripts to it to be executed.

Anything like this on the roadmap? There is only one other monitoring product I know if that will do this (PolyMon), but it runs everything centrally as it doesn't currently have agents.

Thanks,
chris

[Anon Anon]

Chris,

Could you write a probe in PowerShell that does whatever you need and just calls the commands in the NimBUS bin directory to generate alarms and save QoS data?  Then you could have the probe sleep between checks rather than exit each time.  I have found the bin commands to be quite useful when working with scripts that are not in a language supported by the NimBUS SDK.

Regards,
Keith

[Anon Anon]

Having the script sleep is a good idea.

My concern though is that with multiple PowerShell scripts running there are going to be multiple shells held open and consuming resources. One instance at 30MB isn't a bother since most of the servers have at least 32GB, but if I have 10 scripts then it's going to start adding up.

With as popular as PowerShell is becoming and the fact that all Microsoft server technologies will be using it in the future I was hoping that someone might be working on a probe for doing this.

-Chris

[Anon Anon]

Chris,

Those are some interesting numbers.  Of course, this has me wondering how that compares to the memory usage on the Perl probes I have created.  I never really paid a lot of attention to that.  Of course, I am not running 10 of them on any host either.

I think the usual answer when you want NimBUS to do something it does not is that you can do that with the SDK.  While that is probably an option in this case as well, I have no idea how to hold PowerShell open and feed it scripts, so I cannot offer any useful suggestions.

The engineers at Nimsoft are always working on improvements, many of which would be outside my abilities to code myself.  This type of probe sounds like something they could create (or maybe already have plans to create).  However, most of the probes follow the model of serving a single specific purpose.  Rather than having a probe that runs several scripts that do all different things, the usual way to do that in NimBUS would be to make probes out of those scripts.  I am not saying that is the only way, but that seems to be the assumption upon which NimBUS is based.

Let me ask you this...  How often do you want these scripts to run?  For the custom probes I have created, my philosophy has been that those which need to do something only once every five minutes can be spawned every five minutes.  (I create them to run as daemons when possible anyway.)  If they would need to fire off more often than that, then I feel they need to be daemons.  If your scripts are not firing off extraordinarily frequently, running them as probes that fire off every so often might be feasible.  Of course, for a lot of probes, this still leads to a lot of loading.

Finally, it seems that having a single probe fire off several scripts could be dangerous because the scripts could interfere with each other.  If one of them gets hung for some reason, the PowerShell would be unable to take the next script.  There are probably ways to control this, but they would make such a probe even more complicated.

Anyway, those are my thoughts.  I would be curious to hear how you approach this going forward.  And if someone at Nimsoft answers back that a probe is on the way, that should make the decision an easy one!

Regards,
Keith