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Are there any off-the-shelf tools that will expose the basic health of a Windows machine (network accessibility, system load, etc.) over HTTP in a machine-readable form that I can access from another host?

spiffytech
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2 Answers2

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If by "off the shelf" you mean "native to the OS", then no*.

The common native methods of gathering Windows performance statistics are Perfmon (TCP 445), WMI (TCP 445) , or SNMP (UDP 161/162).

Are you interested in just using HTTP for the data connection, or actually desiring to run a human-readable webserver on each target Windows machine showing a health dashboard? If you're running HP or Dell servers, that's actually already included in the vendor-provided systems agents, although it's mostly focused on hardware stats, so not really appropriate for VM guests.

  • I suppose you could count using WinRM over HTTP(S) and gathering perfmon stats directly...
mfinni
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  • I'm open to 3rd-party tools. I don't need the machines to serve the data in a human-readable form, just expose JSON or something over HTTP so other HTTP-only services in my infrastructure can aggregate it. – spiffytech May 19 '17 at 14:06
  • OK, understood. Product recommendations are off-topic per the FAQ, and I don't know of any for this purpose anyway. I think you're on your own, it sounds like you need something fairly specific. Perhaps you can write an agent that could be installed on a local system, perfmon in what you care about, and present that via HTTPS for consumption by you monitoring service. What is your current monitoring service? – mfinni May 19 '17 at 20:45
  • Would be trivial to write a little flask + psutil app. Probably wouldn't be more than 50 lines of code. – Brennen Smith May 20 '17 at 04:38
2

Alright- not exactly what you were looking for, but I was bored and this is a trivial issue to solve. Here is a little flask application:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import psutil
import flask
import json

from flask import Flask
app = Flask(__name__)

def getStats():
    data = {}
    data['cpu_percent'] = psutil.cpu_percent(interval=1, percpu=True)
    data['memory_virt'] = psutil.virtual_memory()
    data['disk_io'] = json.dumps(psutil.disk_io_counters()) 
    data['disk_usage'] = psutil.disk_usage("C:") # double check this, I'm on osx
    return json.dumps(data)

@app.route('/')
def main():
    return getStats()

if __name__ == "__main__":
    app.run(host='0.0.0.0')

Which returns a JSON representation of your CPU, memory, disk IO, and disk usage:

{
   "disk_usage":[
      371011354624,
      273490915328,
      97258295296,
      73.8
   ],
   "memory_virt":[
      17179869184,
      5456252928,
      68.2,
      14814887936,
      102600704,
      5523148800,
      5353652224,
      3938086912
   ],
   "disk_io":"[18150220, 10587005, 1112392108544, 834027424256, 9743448, 3448989]",
   "cpu_percent":[
      20.0,
      1.0,
      16.0,
      0.0,
      12.0,
      0.0,
      16.7,
      1.0
   ]
}

All you need to run this program is 

(save the code above to remote-mon.py and open port 5000 in Windows Firewall)
pip install flask psutil
python remote-mon.py

Then you can call against http://{{machine'sIP}}:5000/ for the json object.

Brennen Smith
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