Concepts - Deployment Scenarios


ServerAssist is suitable for monitoring both large and small internal networks, and is also suitable for those providing monitoring services to external third parties.

Large Corporation

A typical large corporation will have a geographically diverse and heterogeneous network, and will have a number of stakeholders with different areas of interest related to network monitoring.

To meet these requirements, an ideal solution is to have a dedicated server running the operations server, one or more management servers providing agentless monitoring capabilities, and agents deployed to Windows servers.

To avoid monitoring agentlessly over WAN links, at least one management server should be installed at each physical site on the network.  Note that there is no limit to the number of agents or management servers that can be in use, providing unlimited scalability for the monitoring solution.

The single operations server would scan all the managed networks, and thus provide the centralised reporting capabilities, allowing senior management to be provided with status reports covering the whole enterprise, while also allowing network administrators to understand the performance  of individual servers and applications.

Small Business

For a small business, with a handful of servers, the recommended approach is to install the main ServerAssist package onto an existing server on the network, preferably one that is not heavily utilised. A console-only installation would then be performed on the workstation of the person responsible for the management and support of the network.

The console would connect to the management server and operations server on the "monitoring server", thus avoiding the need to log on directly to a production server. Windows agents would then be deployed remotely from the console to each server to be monitored, and SNMP devices such as printers and UPSs would be monitored using the agentless monitoring capabilities of the management server, the configuration of which can be carried out from the workstation-based console.

Managed Service Provider

A managed service provider (MSP) provides, among other services, management of networks to other companies. Typically, the servers that need to be monitored are on small local networks that are not connected by, and have no capability to be connected by, virtual private networks to the MSP's office. In these cases, communication between the ServerAssist components at the remote site and the MSP's office is over the public internet.

The approach taken in this case is to manually install the agent on each monitored server at each client site. Each agent listens for connections from a console on a TCP port, and the firewall on the client site must be configured to allow traffic from the MSP's office directly to each agent. Where the client site only has a limited number of external IP addresses, it may be necessary to configure some agents to listen on different TCP ports. This can be done using the configuration utility included with the packaged agent installation.

Once the agents are installed, connections can be made directly from a console installed at the MSP's office. For situations where it is not possible, for technical or policy reasons, to configure the firewall to allow inbound network traffic, the gateway can be used.