Better Windows Media Services Monitoring

I have had volunteers doing monitoring of our live services for quite some time. One of the trivial tasks that they have done is record the number of active streams during the service so we have metrics of how many people are watching, and of how much bandwidth we use. This has started becoming a growing task since we are adding more streams, and about to start streaming our multi-site service as well.

In the interest of getting better data, and more data points I have written / hacked together a script that will log the data for all the WMS publishing points with active data, and will also record total bandwidth. This little script can be scheduled to run every 5 minutes during your services and it logs the data to a CSV file so you can then import into any Database or Excel and graph or do what you want with it.

I will email the script to anyone interested along with installation instructions. Don't worry, it's really easy. Should take no more than 5 minutes to install have running!

Leave a comment or email me for a copy of the script and installation instructions!

Tuning Terminal Server

We have been using a thin client environment for many of our administrative staff for the last year, and the system has run almost maintenence free, but the time comes when all things need a cleanup. One of the areas I was always curious about was a cleanup of the IE Temporary Items in multiple profiles. I did what any good IT guy does... I googled it. Here is a link to a script that will scrub all the IE Temporary Folders for all profiles on a computer. I have run it and can testify to it working.

http://www.greatnorthcomputing.com/System+Admin+Articles/109.aspx

After making this change, I modified my Group Policy to automatically empty the IE temporary folders every time a user logs off. If you are looking for this Group Policy Item, it can be found in Group Policy Management under:

Computer Configuration->Administrative Templates->Windows Components->Internet Explorer->Internet Control Panel->Advanced Page

Here you will see the Empty Temporary Internet Files folder... This will start preserving the space you have available on the drive because how clean our users are....

Other GP items to note:

I Enabled the Turn Off Crash Detection to knock down some of the annoying IE crashed on... messages when you log onto the Terminal Server as Admin.

I hope this helps someone else!