Monitor Windows workstation uptimes

Question

I need a simple setup to monitor the usage of several Windows 7 machines in our office. Nothing fancy, I just need to know when they are turned on and off, and ideally have an overview of daily uptime hours for them.

The software can either run locally on the machines themselves, or from an office server (Ubuntu Server). The machines in question have static IP addresses.

Any ideas?

If you just need to know when they *were* up, rather than needing real time info, you can get that from the event logs — Rob Moir, Sep 20 '12 at 05:23

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 19 '12 at 12:22

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Just the uptime, or any other data (cpu, ram usage, etc)?

We're using munin with munin-node-win32 for windows boxes. It might be an overkill, but offers other data too, nice graphs, and you can even configure alerts when the uptime is too low/too high.

To configure munin, you need a munin server on a (preferably) linux box (ubuntu server will do), and clients on all monitored machine.

answered Sep 19 '12 at 12:22

mulaz

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Thanks, I didn't know there's a Munin node implementation for Windows, I'll check it out. It is a bit overkill though, since I really only need the uptimes. – olex Sep 19 '12 at 12:26

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 19 '12 at 13:34

One useful tool that will give you the information that you are looking for is S.A.L.A.M.

It is an agent-less tool that was built on a Debian Linux distro and has been also published on the TurnKey Linux site. This solution was built to either be run from a CD or from a VM and takes about 5 mins to setup.

Just keep in mind that this is a basic open source solution so it does not have all of the bells and whistles of the paid options but it will give you the basic information that you are looking for based off of your requirements from the question.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 19 '12 at 12:29

A while back I wrote an "Uptime for Windows" script in VBScript. This is useful if you just want to do a quick check. ("As of right now, what is this machine's uptime?") It could easily be modified or incorporated into another tool or framework that gives you continuous status.

You can run it against remote machines by specifying their name or IP, or if you run without arguments it will get the uptime of the local system.

Note that the computer needs to be reachable, and I think that you need Admin access to it. (I honestly don't remember if I tested it without Admin rights.)

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Sep 20 '12 at 05:08

Well, at the risk of going with the obvious, industry standard option, I'd set up a very basic SNMP monitoring server and enable SNMP on the workstations. You can just monitor up/down, but you'd have the beginning of a much more powerful monitoring system if you decided you wanted to expand its use.

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Sep 20 '12 at 06:35

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As nobody else has mentioned it yet... Nagios. More commonly used to monitor servers but there's absolutely no reason not to use it for workstations, just be sure to either disable the alerts or at least set them appropriately.

answered Sep 20 '12 at 06:35

John Gardeniers

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Monitor Windows workstation uptimes

5 Answers5