PNL tools review Estate Guardian 6.1
At first the prospect of evaluating Estate Guardian seemed a little daunting. I had its capabilities explained to me, and had been presented with a number of installation files and a large manual. I was told it would
This seemed impressive in concept, so I had to see it in action and installed the product.
The standard Estate Guardian installation involves 3 files.
There is a fourth file, which I will talk about later.
The installation went very smoothly, all files being Microsoft Installer (*.msi).
Each machine in your estate is “enrolled”, which also installs a service on that machine – “agent linker”. You also install the Estate Guardian Monitor service on each machine in your estate.
The console provides the management interface to the estate and is installed where required. The console is a convenient MMC snap-in.
Now to create my first view.
A view is simply a data query that asks a question of your estate. The monitors on each enrolled machine provide the data that helps answer the question and this is displayed in your console.
When you first run the console, there are no views configured, but you can see a list of all enrolled machines.
What can you ask in your view? Well, this is the real beauty of Estate Guardian; you can ask pretty much anything of your estate.
Why would you want to ask these questions? Well the first answer is obvious; you want to see which desktops need upgrading. Similarly with software, you want to know which machines are running software, which needs upgrading or patching to the latest version. Why would you need to know who is running Outlook? Well, maybe you want to reboot your exchange servers. Why would you want to know what machines have a certain make of modem installed? Well, perhaps you are upgrading to Windows XP, and there is no suitable driver for that modem, so you want to replace the modems.
So, what do you with your new view? You perform an action.
Actions, can be as simple as sending a pop up message or as advanced as deploying and installing software. You can send a pop up message to everyone using outlook and ask them to close it down. The great thing is that your live view of the estate will then refresh and show a smaller and smaller number of machines running outlook, as each user closes it down. On the advanced side, an action could initiate the deployment of a patch to all your desktops to upgrade software and install it. Then you can see your view update as each machine is updated. You can also just deploy new software to a selection of machines.
Estate guardian provides a wealth of data from which you can build your view. You can build views based on running processes, installed software, installed hardware devices, system information such as OS build, drive space, memory, cpu, IP address and much much more.
The data obtained through your views is provided through the use of tags. These tags are labels associated with each piece of data you obtain from your estate. Some tags provide fixed information such as the {BUILD} tag, which provides the OS build of a machine. Other tags are flexible and can be modified. One example is [HW_DISK_C_SYS_FREE], which provides the free disk space on drive C of your machines. It can be changed to show the free disk space on drive D, e.g. [HW_DISK_D_SYS_FREE].
Other tags are unique to each machine or group of machines. Examples of these tags include running process tags and installed software tags e.g.
[SW_PROCESS_IEXPLORE] – this tag relates to the Internet Explorer process and has a string value that contains information about the process – “Microsoft Corporation; Internet Explorer; 6.00.2800.1106;91136 (*2)”. From the value we can determine the version of Internet Explorer that is running.
You can even create your own tags so you can group machines into departments or other organisational units i.e. [DEPARTMENT]
It gets tricky when you don't know what the tag is for a particular process, piece of software or installed hardware, because there are thousands of processes, software installations and hardware devices across your estate. This is where the fourth installation file comes into play. This file installs an access databaseconnected to a database export service. By creating tables within the database, you can obtain a dump of all data associated with that tag. For example, you can create a table called TAG_SW_INSTALL_* and the service will automatically populate the table with all the installed software tags relevant to your estate. You can then review the database to find appropriate tags to ask a question of your estate and build a view. You don't have to use the supplied database; you can use your own database software such as MS SQL server.
Building your view is done through the use of the tags and applying conditions to the information displayed in the view through a simple expression language e.g. [OS_SYSTEM_VERSION] = "Windows XP Build 2600", which would return true for those machines that satisfied that comparison, and false if they did not. This is a very simple example. You can create advanced Boolean statements and use many available functions to modify and make the returned data more relevant to your question.
You add many columns of data to your view, showing the resultant tag data for each machine in your estate.
Once you have your refined view, you can then perform an action such as software deployment and see the results of the deployment as each machine is upgraded, your view even displaying error data if the deployment was not successful.
In conclusion, Estate guardian really shines because you are not constrained with the pre-defined ideas of the software developer. You don't have a complicated GUI with lots of options and settings. It starts very simply, and you make it as complicated as you like.
Estate Guardian does things a lot differently to other systems management software, so it may seem a bit daunting at first, but you get the hang of it very quickly and the power and usefulness of this software soon becomes evident.
If you are concerned about Network overhead, don't be, as the only data that will pass through your network, is the data you have requested in your view, and you can configure the rate the data is refreshed using tolerances. Each view is fully configurable. If you are concerned about the security of your network, you'll be glad to know that all data is encrypted, and the purpose of enrolment of machines into your estate ensures security.
Even in a small estate, the product has value. In a large enterprise with thousands of workstations this product should prove to be completely invaluable.
Neil Burton – Professional Networks Limited (http://www.pnltools.com)