For windows,How to configure monitoring agents using file-based configuration?

Jason,

Are you running 2010.09?  If so, this version comes with a utlity for creating a Windows service to launch VOV things.  It does not have built-in support for monitoring agents, but I'll write up how to do this below.  If you do not have 2010.09, you can go grab XYNTService, which is the service wrapper that we use in 2010.09, from The Code Project website.

Now, the binary that we normally use for monitoring agents on Windows is "vovinfo".  This is a completely self-contained binary that does not require the entire VOV installation.  It is launched using this syntax:

c:\path\to\vovinfo.exe -s all -p licmon -h lmservername -P 5555 -l 300

You just have to replace "lmservername" with your actual LM server name (full or short name, whatever works in your DNS environment).  The "-l 300" specifies the loop time for data to be sent to the LM server.  The rest should remain as-is unless you have changed the project name or the project port.

For the reason you mentioned in your post (about not having remote connectivity support on Windows), you have to launch the program on the Windows machine itself.  The file-based configuration method that is described in the documentation cannot be used unless you install SSH on the Windows machine, which should work, in theory.  Some customers have used the "srvany" program from the Windows resource kit to create a service for this, but the resource kit is not available in all circumstances.  We decided to use XYNTService for this reason.

XYNTService, when launched, reads a configuration file (that must be located in the same directory as the XYNTService.exe binary, that tells it what to configure as a Windows service.  The syntax for launching this is:

XYNTService.exe -i

Now, here is an example configuration file, which must be named XYNTService.ini:

[Settings]
ServiceName = RTDA-LM-Agent
CheckProcessSeconds = 30
[Process0]
CommandLine = c:\path\to\vovinfo.exe -s all -p licmon -h lmservername -P 5555 -l 300
WorkingDir= c:\
PauseStart= 5000
PauseEnd= 5000
UserInterface = No
Restart = Yes

This one can be used if you are running LM with a license key file (supported in 2010.06 or greater).  If you are still using RLM licensing, then you'll either need to set the RLM_LICENSE variable as a system variable in your Windows machine, or you will need to wrap the vovinfo binary with a bat script that sets up the variable.

An example of such a wrapper (in this case, called startvovinfo.bat) would be:

@echo off
set RLM_LICENSE=7070@rlmserver
c:\path\to\vovinfo.exe -s all -p licmon -h lmservername -P 5555 -l 300

and the XYNTService.ini file would call out the bat script:

[Settings]
ServiceName = RTDA-LM-Agent
CheckProcessSeconds = 30
[Process0]
CommandLine = c:\path\to\startvovinfo.bat
WorkingDir= c:\
PauseStart= 5000
PauseEnd= 5000
UserInterface = No
Restart = Yes

As I mentioned earlier, 2010.09 comes bundled with XYNTService.  You can find it in winNT/bin.  You can also find some examples in winNT/startup.  I know this is a lot of information, but hopefully it will be useful to you to determine a strategy for launching agents on Windows.  We are currently working on simplifying this process for our next release.  It will make use of XYNTService, similar to how I wrote above, but most likely using our "vovssd" remote connectivity daemon so you CAN actually use the file-based configuration method like you would on Unix.

Brian