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MonitorMagic Implementation Guide 

Version 1.0, October 2004 

1. Starting MonitorMagic for the first time 

When you run MonitorMagic for the first time, the application will present itself in a way similar to the 

screenshot below: 

Shortly after this window appears, a first-time configuration wizard will pop-up. Ignore this wizard and 

choose not to show the wizard again. 

2. Window Layout of MonitorMagic 

As you can see, the left-hand corner of MonitorMagic contains a network tree with several tab options, 

shown at the bottom. At the very bottom of the window, the MonitorMagic control center is shown. 

This control center maintains a list of all installed and connected MonitorMagic services, at this time 

the list is empty. The network tree on the left is used to browse and install/update MonitorMagic 

services. The large empty portion on the right hand of the window will be used for several new 

windows which depend on a connection between this client and one or more MonitorMagic services. 

© 2004, Tools4ever – www.tools4ever.com, Page 1 of 23



3. Deploying a MonitorMagic service 

The next step in implementing MonitorMagic is to choose a computer which will run the MonitorMagic 

service. In the recommend setup where all monitoring will be performed using the “agentless” setup, 

where no services will be installed on target computers, a dedicated computer must be assigned to 

host the MonitorMagic service and optionally also the SQL or MSDE database. To install a service, 

browse the network tree, then right-click the computer and choose “Setup Service...”. 

When installing a MonitorMagic, click the “Advanced” button and make sure you understand the 

available options. More information on these options is listed on the next page. 




Additional service installation options (Advanced section): 

User name 

This is the Windows 2000 or Windows NT user account name which will be used by the MonitorMagic 

service. If the account does not exist MonitorMagic will create it with the password specified in the 

next field. By default, MonitorMagic will create the account MonitorMagicSvcAccnt in the domain you 

are logged on to. If the account already exists the password specified in the next field must be 

correct. Otherwise, the MonitorMagic service will not start. The syntax of the service account 

specification is DOMAIN\ACCOUNTNAME. For Windows 2000 domains you must use the NETBIOS 

domain name. If you want to use a local machine account, e.g. not a domain account but a Windows 

NT 4.0 workstation or Windows 2000 Professional account name, you should use the syntax 

\\COMPUTERNAME\ACCOUNTNAME. When upgrading, this field is not used. 

Password 

The password of the service account specified in the field User name. If the specified User name 

already exists the password must be correct. If MonitorMagic creates the account, the password of the 

new account is specified in this field. When upgrading, this field is not used. 

Group (Service account group membership) 

The MonitorMagic service account will be added to this group. By default, the Domain Admins group is 

used. This setting is used to grant the MonitorMagic service sufficient access rights to retrieve 

information from all monitored objects and to execute alarm actions. If the MonitorMagic service 

account does not have sufficient access rights error messages will appear in the computer Application 

event log, and in the MonitorMagic client window. 

Group (MonitorMagic administrator group) 

This group is used to specify the user accounts that are allowed to configure the MonitorMagic service. 

By default, the group is set to the local administrators group. The way this is organized is comparable 

to the way you setup access control for files and directories. 

When the installation completes successfully, the client will automatically connect to the new 

MonitorMagic service, thereby opening a monitor window as shown in the screenshot below: 




4. Policies 

In the network tree you used to browse and install/update a MonitorMagic service, you will also find 

the tabs named Policies and Reports. Click the Policies tab to access the list of pre-configured 

policies for applications, network devices, operating systems and hardware devices. 

Always make sure you use the latest set of policies released by Tools4ever. The easiest way to obtain 

the latest policy bundle is to access our forum through http://forum.tools4ever.com. When you have 

downloaded the latest policy bundle, delete all existing policies under the Local monitor policies 

branch, as shown in the screenshot below. Do this by simply clicking on the first entry, hold shift and 

select the last entry, then right-click and select the Delete option. Now select the Local monitor 

policies branch, click on the Policy menu, select Import policies… and select the downloaded 

policy bundle. You will notice that the policy list has been rebuilt from the new policy bundle. 




5. Setup central monitoring policies 

The previous chapter explained how to import policies in the local monitoring policies branch. Local 

monitoring policies are saved on the client, whereas central monitoring policies are saved on a 

MonitorMagic service. This means: Central monitor policies can be shared by multiple 

MonitorMagic applications installed on different computers. Local monitor policies cannot 

be shared. 

To setup central monitoring policies, right-click on the Central monitor policies branch and select 

Properties. 

In the next dialog, shown in the screenshot below, enter the name of the computer running the 

MonitorMagic service. Note that the local policies are stored in the file listed also in this window. When 

migrating a client to another computer, be sure to make a backup copy of this file. 




6. Using central monitoring policies 

Now that central monitoring policies have been configured, let’s start using it by copying the policies 

that we actively use in our implementation into the central monitor policies branch. To do this, select 

the most widely used policy – “Operating System – Windows General”, right-click and select 

Copy. 

Now, select the Central monitor policies branch, right-click and click Paste. A copy of the original 

policy is now available as a central monitor policy. All clients connecting to the MonitorMagic service 

that we have setup can access the same policy. 




7. Open a second network browse window 

To make applying policies to computers easier, open up a second network browse window by using 

the View, Browse Network. This will add a new network browse tree to the right-hand side of the 

screen. Note that any modifications made to the browse tree on the left are not replicated to the new 

network tree since they operate completely independent. 




8. Service configuration – global keywords & e-mail 

To standardize the e-mail notification system, we recommend that you configure a global keyword for 

the e-mail recipient so that all e-mail notifications are sent to the same address. When this address 

changes, you only have to modify the value of this keyword instead of modifying the e-mail address in 

all your policies. 

To do this, make sure the MonitorMagic Control Center is enabled. You can enable/disable this window 

by selecting the Control center option in the View menu. In this control center, all service 

connections are listed and each connection is represented by a green or red status icon. Right-click on 

the entry that matches the computer you chose to run the MonitorMagic service and select Configure 

service. In the next window, navigate to the Custom keywords tab and add a new entry similar to 

the screenshot below. Next, navigate to the SMTP E-mail tab and enter the details of your outgoing 

SMTP e-mail server. As the MonitorMagic E-mail Address, you can choose a non-existent address 

such as monitormagic@mycompany.com. Some e-mail servers perform additional security checks 

such as the sender’s IP address or Reply-to address, so be careful to specify the correct settings. 




9. Configure database support 

MonitorMagic needs to be connected to a database to store historical data such as performance data, 

free disk space and also event logs. We recommend using a SQL or MSDE database for this purpose. 

To configure database support, access the service configuration using the method as described in the 

previous chapter, but then navigate to the Advanced tab. 

In the Advanced tab, click the Configure database button. In the next dialog, click the Manage 

database tab and then the Create button. The create database wizard will be started, click next to 

continue until you are requested to choose a database type. Select SQL Server and click next. In the 

following dialog, enter the name of the computer where an instance of SQL Server or MSDE is 

running. All next dialogs can be ignored since their default settings are ok, so click next until you can 

finish the wizard. 

When finished, you can click OK on every dialog until you are no longer inside the service 

configuration. Now, select the entry in the MonitorMagic Control Center representing the computer 

running a MonitorMagic service, right-click and select Refresh. You will notice that the database 

column now reads “SqlServer, OK”. 




10. Summary Part 1: Configuration 

In the previous chapters, you have successfully configured all MonitorMagic fundamentals. A 

MonitorMagic service has been installed on a designated computer. All monitoring activity will be 

coming from this computer, without installing any services on other computers. All policies have been 

updated and central policies have been configured to support policy sharing. You have also added a 

second network browse tree to make applying policies to computers easier. To finish the basic service 

configuration, all settings related to email notification and database support have been configured. 




11. Preparing to apply Windows policies 

Before we can begin to apply policies and start monitoring, we have to keep our environment clean 

and organized. To do this, drag all computers that will be monitored to the Manual Computers 

branch, this automatically creates a copy of the computer in the manual computers folder. You can 

also create custom entries for computers that have their browsing service disabled and are therefore 

hidden. To do this, right-click on the Manual Computers branch and select Add computer, as 

shown below. 




12. Apply policies 

You can now begin to apply policies to your servers listed in the Manual Computers branch of the 

network tree. To do this, drag the Operating System – Windows General policy and drop it on the 

top entry of the Manual Computers branch. Repeat this action for every computer. Note that when 

you drag-and-drop a policy, new entries appear in the window in the middle of the client, called the 

Monitor window. 

When applied, policies are activated immediately. As you can see in the screenshot below, a disk 

monitor on one of the computers has raised an alert. Based on the configuration performed in 

previous chapters, you probably received one or more e-mail alerts from MonitorMagic. When done 

applying this policy, scroll through the monitor window and look for red entries. If none exist, you will 

not receive any email alerts. 

Also note that this window will contain a great number of entries, one for each monitor. As you apply 

more policies, this window is not the perfect place to get a quick overview of the status of your 

servers, so later on we will introduce a new window for this purpose. 




13. Setup report data collection 

The first set of policies is now active and is storing data into the database connected to MonitorMagic. 

Data storage for the policy Operating System – Windows General has been pre-configured; make 

sure for new policies that require data storage, to enable this setting. 

The only information that is currently not being recorded into the database is the Windows event log. 

Since event logs can become very large in size, MonitorMagic has a separate scheduler to enable 

event log archiving outside office hours to minimize the impact on your network. To enable event 

archiving, go to the Report menu and click Configure report data collection. When prompted, 

specify the MonitorMagic service which will perform the event archiving operation and continue. The 

next dialog is the report profile configuration window, where you can setup how, which and when 

event logs are stored. Click the Add button to create a new profile and assign a name to it, as shown 

below. Next, select the option to archive only specific logs and select the Application and System logs 

from the window. Make sure the checkbox “Get report log information now” is selected, since that 

will trigger the immediate event log archiving process for test purposes. Click OK to exit this 

configuration and return to the report profiles window. Select the report profile and click the 

Computers button. Assign the computers you want to include in the event archiving process and 

confirm your configuration by clicking OK until you return to the main client application. 




14. Monitoring event archiving 

To access the status on the event archiving jobs, go to the Report menu and click Overview report 

data collection. A new window opens, containing information about the event archiving jobs. The 

event archiving process is separated into jobs for each computer. 

Since this window does not automatically refresh, use the F5 key to manually refresh its contents. 

Scroll to the right-hand side of this window to see if the collection has finished. In the screenshot 

below, you can see that the collection of all three jobs has finished at 10:09. 

Note: Make sure all archiving jobs have completed before continuing. 




15. Preparing to apply SNMP policies 

MonitorMagic provides integration with several well-known network and hardware devices, such as 

Cisco, Dell, HP and IBM. To use this integration, the use of the SNMP protocol is required. This means 

that the system or device you want to monitor must be equipped with an active SNMP agent. For 

example, to monitor the specific hardware details of a HP Server, it must run the appropriate Insight 

Manager agent software. 

To simplify working with SNMP policies, create entries for each host or device you want to monitor 

using SNMP in the Manual SNMP Hosts branch, as shown below. To access a system using SNMP, a 

valid community string must be passed along with an Object Identifier (OID), which represents the 

monitored resource (disk, fan, interface, etc). The OID is embedded into each policy, while the 

community string and IP address is variable per host. As a result, each host must be added separately 

by using the Add SNMP host as shown below. 




16. Applying SNMP policies 

The snmp hosts are in place, so we can now apply SNMP policies to the hosts. Use the same method 

as when using Windows policies to drag and drop the policy onto a SNMP host. This example uses the 

generic SNMP policy “MonitorMagic – SNMP examples”, which can be activated on any Windows 

server that runs the SNMP service. When applied, close the network browse tree on the right-hand 

side of the screen to enlarge the client workspace. Scroll the monitor window all the way to the 

bottom to inspect the newly added SNMP monitors. 

Use this same mechanism to apply Compaq Insight Manager, Dell OpenManage, IBM Director, 

or any of the Network devices policies. The APC PowerChute policy is also SNMP enabled. All these 

policies have pre-configured rules and notification, so you don’t need to worry about any additional 

configuration. The default settings should work fine in most circumstances. 




17. Create a ping policy for routers and servers 

The final step towards a complete basic MonitorMagic implementation is setting up support for uptime 

alerts and reports. To do this, we use the basic ping monitor in addition with database storage, email 

notifications and pre-configured reports. 

To create a new policy, right-click on the Central monitor policies branch as shown below and select 

Create policy. Specify the name “Ping” and click OK. A new empty policy is now available, so select 

it and right-click, followed by Add monitor and Ping. We will start by adding the host names for each 

Windows server, so click Add in the next dialog. 




The first set of monitors we will be creating is for the servers. To create a separate monitor for each 

server, specify the NETBIOS computer name in the first edit box. Leave all settings to their defaults 

and click OK. You will see that a monitor has been created. Now repeat this procedure for all 

monitored Windows servers. When they are added to the list of monitored hosts, click OK to confirm 

your configuration. In the properties of the monitor, go to the Database tab and enable database 

storage. 

When you expand your new Ping policy to the first level, you will notice that a monitor has been 

created, which has been automatically named to represent your server names. Right-click on this new 

entry and click Rename. Type in the name: “Servers”. 

The next batch of ping monitors will be created for the routers and switches. Select the ping policy 

and right-click, then select Add monitor, then Ping. Repeat the same procedure as when added 

servers, but now type in the IP addresses instead of the NETBIOS host names. Confirm your changes, 

and then rename the new monitor to “Routers & Switches”. 

To finish the configuration of the Ping policy, we need to add rules and alerts. To do this, select the 

monitor that we renamed to “Serves”, right-click and select Add rule. Click Add and specify the rule 

as shown in the screenshot above. Click OK to confirm your changes and you will notice that the new 

rule has been added to the list of rules. Click on the Alarm actions tab and click Add to add a new 

alarm action. Select the E-mail message and click OK to continue. In the destination field, specify 

%SMTPALARM% as keyword, since we already defined this as the global source for all notifications. 

Click on the Message tab, and specify the contents of the message as shown below. 

When you confirm all your changes and return to the main client window, you will notice that when 

you expand the Ping policy, then the “Servers” monitor to the deepest level, the rule and the alarm 

action have been added. You can quickly replicate the rule and alarm action to the “Routers & 

Switches” monitor by simply using copy and paste on the rule. 

Now, apply the Ping policy by dragging and dropping it on the Monitor window. When you scroll this 

window to the top, you will notice that the ping monitors will appear. 




18. Generate reports 

Before you run any reports, make sure you download the latest report bundle. The latest version of 

the reports is always available on our forum at http://forum.tools4ever.com. The download file is a 

self-extracting executable which contains all new report templates. To use these templates, close the 

MonitorMagic client and browse to the program files folder where the MonitorMagic client application is 

installed (Program Files\Tools4ever\MonitorMagic\ReportTemplates). In the ReportTemplates 

subfolder, execute the report bundle to extract the report template files. You can now start the 

MonitorMagic client application. The new report templates are loaded automatically. 

Your configuration is now ready to use the reporting feature. In the policy tree on the left-hand side of 

the screen, switch to the Reports tab. Expand all report folders to see all available pre-configured 

reports in MonitorMagic. 

Reports that Tools4ever recommends for weekly server and network maintenance are the “Server 

Advanced Statistics – All Servers – Last Week”, and the “Server Log System Events Per Day - 

All Servers - Last Week”. These reports contain all vital status information related to CPU, memory, 

disk, uptime, backup & antivirus, and event logs. The second log report adds extra intelligence by 

displaying a block of all events per server per day, so you can easily spot anything out of the ordinary 

by quickly looking at the size of the blocks. Run these reports by double-clicking on them, or using 

right-click, then Generate report. 




19. Configure automatic report e-mail distribution 

MonitorMagic features automatic report distribution, which means that you can instruct the 

MonitorMagic service to generate reports and send them to an e-mail address on a custom schedule. 

To configure this, we need to copy the report templates to a location accessible to the MonitorMagic 

service. The best way to do this is to create an additional subfolder in the MonitorMagicService folder, 

which is created by the service installer in the computer running the MonitorMagic service (default = 

Program Files\MonitorMagicService). 

To start off, we need to find out what the file names are of the report templates that we want 

distributed, so select the report, right-click and select Properties. In the lower edit box, scroll all the 

way to the right to find the actual file name, as shown below. 

Locate the file or files you have found in the Program Files\Tools4ever\MonitorMagic\ReportTemplates 

folder and copy these to the newly created ReportTemplates folder on the computer running the 

MonitorMagic service, as shown below. Copy the absolute path, since we will need this later on. 




Return to the MonitorMagic client application, go to the Report menu and click Configure report E- 

mail distribution. When prompted, select the MonitorMagic service that we have installed in previous 

chapters. 

Specify the e-mail address without using the %SMTPALARM% keyword, since that is not used in this 

operation. Now paste the absolute path in the Directory edit box. Finally, modify the schedule to 

something more appropriate like the example shown below. Make sure to enable the checkbox 

“Generate and send the reports now (test)”, since that will cause MonitorMagic to immediately 

generate and send the reports to the designated mailbox. 




20. Global alarm window 

The configuration of MonitorMagic is completely, we can now enable the status overview window, 

which is called the Global Alarm Window. 

To do this, go to the View menu and select the Global alarm window. Maximize this window and 

close both the tree windows on the left and right-hand side of the screen. Sort the first column of this 

window to make sure the alarm entries are at the top. 

You will notice that the alarm description is cryptic in some cases. This is because the alarm 

description is exactly the same as the rule name for each monitor. In order to make these alarms 

understandable, edit the rule names for each policy and re-apply them. In the screenshot below, you 

can see that the second alarm description has been modified to make it more understandable for an 

end user. 




21. Summary Part 2: Successful implementation 

In the previous chapters, you have successfully configured and implemented MonitorMagic in a typical 

network environment. You applied all necessary policies, created a custom policy to monitor servers 

and routers & switches using the ping monitor. You then also performed basic SNMP configuration and 

applied your first SNMP policy. 

To finish the configuration, you have configured MonitorMagic to automatically generate intelligent 

reports based on a custom schedule.

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