C3 Spotlight - Service Monitor (Free Service Monitoring with IBM BigFix!)

Hello!

It’s been a little while since the last C3 post but I wanted to drop a note that we are still adding and improving content – there are no brakes on the C3 Train :). Today I wanted to let you guys know about the Service and Process Monitor capabilities within C3 Inventory!

Click here for information on the C3 set of projects (and how to set it up with your BigFix Environment) please see the announcement post!

What is Service Monitor?

Service Monitor is what it sounds like! A Windows (for now) Service Monitor designed to audit, report, and optionally remediate service outages in your organization. The goal of C3 Service Monitor is to make it easy to monitor LOTS of services.

Service Monitor is currently in production across a small number of organizations and is monitoring tens of thousands of services already.

Out of the box we have the fixlets for configuring service monitoring for the following services:

  • 1E NightWatchman
  • Active Directory Certificate Authority
  • Active Directory Federation Services
  • Blackboard Learn
  • IBM BigFix Components
  • McAfee ePO Agent
  • Microsoft Applocker
  • Microsoft EMET
  • Microsoft Hyper-V Guest Services
  • Microsoft Hyper-V Host Services
  • Microsoft IIS
  • Microsoft SCCM Agent
  • Microsoft Skype for Business Services
  • Microsoft SQL Server
  • Microsoft Windows Basic Services
  • Microsoft Windows DFS
  • Microsoft Windows DHCP Server
  • Microsoft Windows DNS Server
  • Microsoft Windows SNMP
  • VMWare Tools

How does it work?

Configure

First we configure the BigFix Client with groups of services we want it to monitor:

setting "besservicemonitor-ftp-service"="MSFTPSVC;IISADMIN"
setting "besservicemonitor-McAfee-ePO-Agent"="masvc;McAfeeFramework;macmnsvc"
setting "besservicemonitor-microsoft-iis"="W3SVC"
setting "besservicemonitor-microsoft-windows-snmp"="SNMP"
setting "besservicemonitor-solarwinds-agent"="SolarWindsAgent64"
setting "besservicemonitor-vmware-tools"="VMTools"
setting "besservicemonitor-VPN-Remote-Access"="RaMgmtSvc;RemoteAccess"

Every service we want to monitor has a setting, “besservicemonitor-friendlyname” which is equal to a semi-colon separated list of the service names to monitor.

Monitor

Then we utilize the analysis: “Service Monitor - Windows” to look at our configured services to monitor and identify which are in a failing state, reporting those with a property.

We can then use Web Reports to email out alert emails during service outages and optionally, automatically start the services.

We also have a convenient powershell helper script to help you generate fixlets to monitor new services.

Remediate

There is also a fixlet, “Invoke - Service Monitor Remediation - Windows” which will use the failing services list and attempt to start the failed services. This fixlet will track which services it starts and when so you can report on services remediated.

How do I get started?

We have detailed setup instructions available here but the jist of it is:

  1. Activate the Service Monitor Analysis
  2. Start Monitoring Services
  3. Report on Failing Services
  4. Remediate Failing Services

Summary

To learn more about C3 please see the original announcement

Let me know if you have any questions or concerns and of course feel free to reach out if you’d like help setting up C3 Service Monitor for IBM BigFix.

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