Chapter 17. Watching Your System

The best time to know about a problem is before it happens. This is as true in the IT world as much as anywhere else. If you want to know about potential problems with servers before they morph into a full-blown crisis, you have to watch the servers or, said another way, monitor them.

With just a little bit of proactive monitoring, you can identify minor errors and negative trends before they bloom into hardcore problems.

Two monitoring tools you'll find very effective when watching your servers are Event Viewer and Performance Monitor. Event Viewer includes a sophisticated feature called event forwarding that you can use to monitor events from multiple servers. Performance Monitor includes powerful data collector ...

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