Introducing remote Windows Server monitoring with the Windows Server ActiveGate extension

While OneAgent continues to offer best-in-class monitoring of Windows environments, operational or security policies within some enterprises may not allow the installation of OneAgent. In addition, some enterprises run older versions of Windows (e.g., Windows Server 2003) which are not supported by OneAgent. Regardless of why OneAgent-based monitoring isn’t a feasible option, Dynatrace is pleased to announce the availability of an alternative solution: the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) ActiveGate extension. Utilizing the openness of the Dynatrace platform (specifically the ActiveGate plugin framework), this extension enables remote monitoring of Windows hosts.

Prerequisites

• An Environment ActiveGate (version 1.155+) that has the ActiveGate plugin module installed and isn’t used for synthetic or mainframe monitoring
  • One environment ActiveGate can typically support 30-50 Windows Server hosts
• Windows Server host that supports WMI
• A user account belonging to both the Performance Monitor and Distributed COM user groups that has the following WMI rights:
  • Enable Account
  • Remote Enable
  • Read Security

What’s included

Every minute, Dynatrace remotely ingests all of the most crucial data from your Windows hosts through the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) interface and this extension. However, without context, all this data is just more noise. Data from the WMI ActiveGate extension is continuously analyzed by the Dynatrace platform and is used to provide answers to one of the most critical monitoring questions: How are my Windows hosts performing?

Using CPU, memory, disk, process and network metrics, properties, and events from your hosts, Dynatrace gains real-time visibility into the health and performance of your environment. The resulting insights are presented to you through automatically generated visualization tools, dashboards, infographics, and reports. We separate the signal from noise.

The WMI ActiveGate extension is easy to deploy and is developed, maintained, and fully supported by Dynatrace. Simply put, it provides the best-in-class Windows infrastructure monitoring that you’ve come to expect from Dynatrace, for the very occasions where OneAgent deployment is not a feasible solution.

Coming soon

Remote monitoring of Windows Server hosts with Dynatrace is about to get better. With upcoming updates to Davis® (the Dynatrace AI engine), data from ActiveGate extensions will be incorporated into our root-cause analysis. This means we will soon be able to deliver insights that go beyond host performance. We will provide answers to the other critical question—which service/customer-impacting problems are attributable to issues with your Windows hosts?

Interested in adding Remote monitoring of Windows Server to your Dynatrace experience?

Please reach out to Dynatrace One.