Server Management Suite

Today I'm going to talk about something that server admins fear the most. Server Documentation.

As we all know, installing a server, configuring it and then generally playing with it (often till it breaks) is fun. But the moment you want a server to move into production, you just know someone is going to ask that fearsome question of "... and where is the documentation?". The emotional impact of this  question should not be underestimated;  it can be so severe it can result in a rather unsightly Administrator Implosion Event.

But, documentation is important. The process is critical  to confirm that what you think you've done is what you have done. It's also really rather helpful in the future when you need to make some changes, or as can often be the case, undo them.

So here's me nearly at that point of making a Monitor Solution 7.1 server live in our environment. So, I decided to avoid an AIE by documenting the setup. Very quickly I realised how complex documenting Monitor Solution is. Apart from all the usual bread-and-butter server installation and agent deployment bit,  we need to consider,

1. Policy documentation
2. Rule Documentation
3. Metric documentation

And there is really quite a lot there. Doing this manually is just soul destroying so I opened up a SQL window on the server and started to see what I could do to automate the task. After a couple of days the end result was very satisfying; I'd created a process for dumping the monitor server configuration in a format detailed enough to certainly convince me that it was a job well done.

As there is so much to my thought threads on approaching this, I've decided to make this a small series of bite sized articles. This first article will focus on how to present a summary computers with policies  so you can with ease include word graphics like this below in your server docs,

This is quite a useful report. When I first ran it I found  a machine which had fallen through the net and didn't have any policies applied. 

1. First Steps -What Policies Apply to What Computers?

Before we can write out full SQL for this report, we first need to find the T-SQL  which exposes our Monitor policies. The first step here is to find the policy class guid which is applicable to Monitor Solution.

1.1 Monitor Solution's Policy Guid

The view vitemClass will list all classes which are created by the solutions installed on the SMP so by first query here was,

SELECT type, 
       guid 
FROM   vitemclass 
WHERE  type LIKE '%Monitor%' 

Now, what I expected here was for a type to appear which would ring bells for agentless and agentbased monitor policies, only there wasn't. Instead I got 87 rows of types, none of which looked like a Monitor Policy object. So you get to see what these types look like, below is a small sample of the output.

A quick scouring of CONNECT helped here with Andrew Bosch's response to a response to a forum request. The user was asking for a query to find all targets associated with a policy. This query used the policy class guid ''0821A65B-5338-464C-824D-9F7CEC48EA56' for monitor policies.

If we put this into our vItemClass query however we see it won't be quite enough,

select Type from vItemClass where Guid like '0821A65B-5338-464C-824D-9F7CEC48EA56'

This was a surprise; this will only give us agent-based policy types. As agentless types also exist, there must be another Guid,  

SELECT type, 
       guid 
FROM   vitemclass 
WHERE  type LIKE 'Altiris.Monitor.Common.MonitorPack.MonitorPack%' 

This is much more revealing,

1.2 Getting a list of all Enabled Monitor Solution Policies

This is now most of the way there. And unfortunately this is where it get's messy. You see what we've got to do now is merge all the ordered policy entries for each computer into a single string.  Each row should have two columns, one for the computer and the other for the policies stuffed into an ordered string.

T-SQL has an excellent command for stuffing strings into strings, and it's called STUFF. For SQL 2005 Servers and beyond, you can use the STUFF command in conjunction with FOR XML to concatenate strings. If I take the above SQL table as being called OrderedPolicies, the SQL for our nicely stuffed output is,

SELECT Upper(vc2.name)                     AS 'Computer', 
       Stuff((SELECT Cast(',' AS VARCHAR(max)) 
                     + OrderedPolicies.policy 
              FROM   (SELECT ..... ......) OrderedPolicies 
              WHERE  OrderedPolicies.computerguid = vc2.guid 
              FOR xml path('')), 1, 1, '') AS [Policies Applied] 
FROM   vcomputer vc2 

where I've made the SQL look a bit cleaner by not duplicating the SQL for the OrderedPolicies table. The output is now pretty much exactly as I'd like it.

This is ready to be pasted into word as a table, have a table style applied and then perform a search/replace to replace the comma with a line break,

3. The Final SQL

For those who have made it here, here is the final SQL code I use to create my Computer policy distribution tables. You'll notice The SQL code below replaces the comma with the text "NL" . This is simlpy so I can perform the search/replace in a larger document without worrying about linebreaks being pushed in erroneously. You can change this to whatever suites you.

SELECT computer, 
       Replace([policies applied], ',', '"NL"') 
FROM   (SELECT Upper(vc2.name)                     AS 'Computer', 
               Stuff((SELECT Cast(',' AS VARCHAR(max)) 
                             + OrderedPolicies.policy 
                      FROM   (SELECT TOP 5000 vc.name          AS 'Computer', 
                                              vc.guid          AS 'ComputerGuid' 
                                              , 
PolicyCount.name AS 'Policy', 
PolicyCount.guid AS 'Policy Guid', 
PolicyCount.count 
FROM   vcomputer vc 
JOIN vpolicyappliestoresource 
ON vc.guid = 
vpolicyappliestoresource.resourceguid 
JOIN 
(SELECT vnonresourceitem.name, 
vnonresourceitem.guid, 
Count(*) AS 'Count' 
FROM   vpolicyappliestoresource 
JOIN vcomputer vc 
ON 
vpolicyappliestoresource.resourceguid = vc.guid 
    JOIN vnonresourceitem 
      ON vnonresourceitem.guid = 
vpolicyappliestoresource.policyguid 
WHERE  ( classguid = 
'0821A65B-5338-464C-824D-9F7CEC48EA56' 
OR 
classguid = 'F4767927-21AF-4875-B1B0-400852689DB1' ) 
AND enabled = 1 
GROUP  BY vnonresourceitem.guid, 
vnonresourceitem.name) PolicyCount 
ON vpolicyappliestoresource.policyguid = 
PolicyCount.guid 
ORDER  BY vc.name ASC, 
PolicyCount.count DESC, 
PolicyCount.name) OrderedPolicies 
WHERE  OrderedPolicies.computerguid = vc2.guid 
FOR xml path('')), 1, 1, '') AS [Policies Applied] 
FROM   vcomputer vc2) FormattedComputerPoliciesTbl 
ORDER  BY computer ASC 

And with that it's time to end this article. It's been a lot of SQL, but ultimately you don't need to understand it. Just take a minute to,

1. Paste the code above into SQL Server management studio
2. Run it
3. Copy the table formatted output into Microsoft Word
4. Search and Replace, changing the "NL" string to a manual linebreak
5. Format your table with your favourite style

The next coming in this series will cover the SQL for documenting how your active Monitor policies are built.

Ian./