Windows Genuine Advantage Server Down, Bill Give us a Ring

Today’s news has been peppered with the outage of the Windows Genuine Advantage servers today. Now we aren’t endorsing DRM rights by any means but if you are running mission critical servers you need to look beyond availability monitoring. If the system is customer facing you probably will know by the inquiries from angry customers soon enough that your servers are down. That’s why having a view of system performance is helpful to prevent outages and to prevent them.
For example, say you are only monitoring for availability you only know that a server is down once everyone else does. The ideal situation is to monitor both performance and availability. For example, say you are monitoring a web server, you might want to use Zenoss to monitor performance and set alerts when that web server reaches 90% CPU utilization so you can check to see how long before the CPU pegs and your web server becomes unresponsive. You also may want to look at the processes for your application servers like Tomkat Tomcat or JBoss, the more information and the more likely you are to prevent many outages.
You could also use our Zenoss Enterprise to monitor web transactions like form submissions (think shopping carts) to validate that not only is the website up but the mechanics are running as desired.

I am sure that Microsoft monitors their infrastructure. However, in case they need a new solution the offer is open download Zenoss Core for free and give us a call if you need help.