How to allow users to monitor performance of a set of servers without touching every server?

Posted by Jon Seigel on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Jon Seigel
Published on 2011-02-03T06:02:44Z Indexed on 2011/02/03 7:27 UTC
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Filed under:

permissions

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windows-server-2008-r2

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perfmon

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scaling

I'm not a sysadmin, so this may be trivial.

We have about 20 Windows Server 2008 R2 VMs we want to monitor centrally using Perfmon. The only issue is that the user account that's going to be doing the monitoring is not (and I assume will never be) in the Administrators group. The servers, and the user account (currently one, but could be more) are all on the same domain.

Right now we're running a pilot with 5 of the servers, touching each VM manually to set the permissions, which is already getting cumbersome to manage. If we decide to roll this out to all the servers, we need a scalable solution to control access.

What is the most flexible way to accomplish this? I'd like a solution that would work with 200 servers just as easily as the 20 servers we have now.

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