What tool do you use to monitor your clients?

Question

Well, we had "What tool do you use to monitor your servers?", and I wondered, do you (and should you) monitor your clients (desktops and laptops)? What tools are useful for this?

It seems to me that one should monitor the clients -- to guage how well they are performing, perhaps to keep an eye on battery life and power usage, perhaps watching hard drive, network, CPU and maybe even GPU usage, and, indeed, to see if lab users avoid a certain machine or if it never shows up on the network.

Please state which platform(s) a given tool works with, and the licence or cost, if it is easily determined.

Answer 1

You might want to look at an 'Asset Management Tool' that usually delivers the services of monitoring client's software/hardware. There are a few posts about these kinds of solutions:

• What is a good cost effective IT asset-management solution

• Can anyone recommend a light weight asset management tool for a small organization?

Answer 2

Munin. If it's good enough for the servers, it's good enough for the workstations. :) As far as I'm aware it's Linux only, but I can't see why you couldn't write a Windows version. It's free, which is nice.

Answer 3

We use ZABBIX to monitor 10 servers and 100 clients.

ZABBIX is an enterprise-class open source distributed monitoring solution.
ZABBIX is software for monitoring of your applications, network and servers.

You can monitor things like bandwidth, cpu usage, total memory, free memory, number of processes, free space on the hdd, uptime, etc. It has some very good templates for monitoring Exchange, SQL, Linux.

Answer 4

I use Zenoss Core to monitor network equipment and Windows/Linux VMs via SNMP www.zenoss.com

Open source, the enterprise level is probably pretty costly. Anything that your SNMP agent will send it will pick up.