For today’s blog I thought I’d talk a little about a couple small features that came in the latest version of up.time. Specifically I want to talk about the Windows agent/agent-less monitoring and service groups.
I’ve already talked enough on the agent vs. agent-less Windows stuff, but there may be a feature most people are not familiar with. Once you add a Windows agent or agent-less system to up.time, it is not locked down to that protocol; you can convert them. For example, let’s say originally we added all our Windows systems to up.time as agent systems. We can keep them as they are and not make any changes, or we can actually convert these systems to use the Windows agent-less (WMI) method. Where and how? Glad you asked.
Your up.time “superadmin” user can login and click on the “Config” tab at the top and go to the “Bulk Element Conversion” section. Here they will be able to select their Windows systems and convert them to/from agent/agent-less. Before you can do this though, just go to the link above it named “Global Element Settings” so you can specify the default settings that will be used for the conversion, such as what default uptime port (9998) and/or the default user/pass for WMI authenticated user. Then you can freely convert to/from agent and agent-less collection methods with a simple click.
The other little-known feature is in our service groups capability. You could always detach a service from a service group if you wanted to make an exception, but the problem was that it was a confusing process to “re-attach”. Once a service was detached from a service group, the only way to get it synced up again was to delete the service, remove the system from the service group, and then re-add the system. This would cause all the monitor(s) to be re-created for that system. You can see how this might be confusing.
Now, when you detach a service from a service group, you get a “re-attach service” button that appears and does just that. This makes managing exceptions and undo-ing accidental service detachment super easy and flexible, and these are just some of the little things we’re constantly improving. Next time I think I’ll talk a little about how our MDC (Multi-DataCenter) functionality actually works.
