Windows agent update – 1.1.1: improved CPU metrics and MongoDB

Developing for monitoring Windows servers has been interesting. With Linux backgrounds, we’ve learnt a lot in the short time our Windows agent has been available for our server monitoring service, Server Density.

We have just released an update to the agent which introduces many improvements since the 1.0 release. 1.1.0 was released a week or so ago, and this is a further update to that.

The new agent uses a different system API to collect the statistics we use to make it more reliable and compatible across different Windows versions. API availability can differ across the Windows OSs we support so this provides a more consistent reporting mechanism.

CPU statistics

We have also modified the way we collect CPU statistics. On Linux, the load average is useful because it is averaged (hence the name!). On Windows, the CPU % shows the value at the time you query it. This means you might get a sudden spike or miss spikes that happen when the agent is not sampling. As such, we now take regular samples and average those over the sample period (60 seconds) to give a more useful picture of CPU load.

We’re also collecting minimum and maximum values. These are not yet exposed in our UI but are being stored for a future release so we can provide more useful troubleshooting.

MongoDB & IIS

v1.1 also introduced MongoDB support for Windows deployments (docs), as well as improved IIS statistic collection.

Updating

As part of our security policy, the agent does not update itself so you will need to launch the config app either from the Start menu or from the Server Density tray icon. This will prompt you that there is an update and then run the updater.

Let us know if you have any problems.