Windows Services ...admin

[dougsyer]

From what I understand, with this ZenPack you will create a template to monitor/unmonitor windows services at the device class level.

We have 3 challenges here on our side. Most of these wouldn't effect smaller deployments but it probably will effect us significantly given factors of scale and multi-tenancy.

Challenge One:

Unless I'm mistaken, you will need to have manage/manage dmd permissions to be able to monitor/unmonitor services.

Typically my group sets the default service monitoring and we delegate out the permissions to the device owners to monitor/unmonitor their own individual services. We do this by using local roles that provide manage_device access(cant delete but can unmonitor components, etc).

Challenge Two:

Today, when we are setting the standard windows monitors we set them typically based on the services being set to auto start. this works well since for something like an Exchange server, many services are ONLY important if you are deploying the roll/feature on that server. Typically people will set their services to auto when they use the feature on the server. We break out device classes for individual Exchange roles to manage templates today but there are alot of subtleties as to weather a service is important even on a per-role basis. ie not all your edge servers will care about pop/imap/activesync services.

It there, will there be a mechanism to determine the start status?

Challenge Three:

Services are constantly changing based on upgrades/new popular software, etc. Today we have a process to review key services periodically and adjust things. It is VERY easy to do this in the services view under infrastructure. It looks like we will have to have a report to check the services inventory then have to jump to the templates to manage the templates. more work can equal more mistakes.

Also, on thing that is great now is that you can get a quick service inventory and manage the services from one place. this equals less mistakes...

Another related concerns is the current layout of the templates gui is sufficient IMO for managing performance templates where you are not making daily/hourly changes but its going to be hard to use once we have a ton of service templates. its had to tell where the templates are bound unless you are very careful. We can script template creation but this isnt a friendly way to delegate work to non-zenoss experts..

I can see the benefit of binding services to device classes but today, I can tell you as someone monitoring > 1k windows services, the existing setup work well and if we have an exception...thats what transforms are for and or overrides to individual services services.