performance - Real time monitoring of MS Windows servers and their services

We have a bunch of large HDTVs in our monitoring office keeping an eye on all of our production equipment.

We are monitoring:

Cisco routers

• HP switches


• HP proliant servers


• Windows 2003


• IIS


• SQL server

At the moment we use

• Nagios for uptime/availability and alert sending


• Cacti for bandwidth usage


• Perfmon running on Vista for server performance


• A combination of other tools and our own custom code to monitor our actual application performance.

All of this is fine apart from the Perfmon part - it gives us what we want - i.e. real time charts on the screen, logging certain performance counters, etc - the only problem is setting it up is a real chore. If the Vista PC running Perfmon is rebooted (normally due to Windows Update) then setting all the counters up again takes ages - literally an hour or two's worth of work for somebody in the office...

Anybody know of a way to either:
1. Script adding Perfmon counters

2. Another tool with graphical output and WMI/windows counter access.

Thanks

Answer

I would seperate out the charting/display from the montioring/alerting piece. You haven't said how many object you have. For most shops I'd write a powershell script to get the counters I want and pipe the output to powergadgets and for small shops use polymon to monitor the windows stuff and groundwork to monitor the rest. In a larger environment (30+ servers) I'd take a look at System Center Operations Manager for monitoring and alerting. You have to realize howver that SCOM is NOT just monitoring. It's designed to correct problems and ensure business service, unlike most monitoring software that only cares about server counters. Other options would be tivoli or openview.