FAQ > FAQ Common

Q: How much is a single workspace license? Will I get a CD or do I have to download the program with a product key ?

A: Usually, our customers download the software in the customer area. If you want to have a CD, we will gladly provide you with a CD for a small fee. Please refer to our price list for further information.

Q: If I am going to monitor two servers with one workstation, how many licenses do I need to purchase?

A: It is sufficient to purchase one license in such a case. You can monitor as many sites as you wish with one installation of ServerSentinel.

Q: How can I order ServerSentinel and how will it be delivered?

A: You may order online at https://www.jam-software.com. You will find a fax order form there as well. We accept purchase orders from companies and will invoice them on NET30 terms. After your order is processed, you will be able to download the full version of the product in our customer's area. If you choose to receive the software on CD, shipping costs will be added to your order. You will then receive the software by airmail within 2-7 days, dependent on where you are located.

Q: What is the difference between the evaluation copy and the full version? Will there be additional features?

A: The evaluation copy allows you to test the software before you buy it. The evaluation time is limited to 30 days. Further usage of the software after this period is not permitted and violates the law. In order to allow our customers to fully test our software products, our evaluation versions usually do not contain significant limitations. But the software may remind you from time to time to purchase it after you are finished testing it .
After purchasing the full version, registered customers will receive free updates within the current major version.

Q: I have the trial version installed and want to buy the full version. How can I keep the data that I already have entered?

A: All settings and data you entered in the trial version will be available in the full version.

Q: Why don't you use activation codes that turn the trial version into a full version?

A: We do not work with activation codes because you can find them very easily on the internet. We work with separate trial and full versions. After purchasing our software, customers get an account for our customer's area where they can download the full version for at least 12 months. We will also send a CD at additional cost. Our customers will also receive an installation key, which will be necessary to install the full version. You should keep both in a safe place. Installing the full version over the trial version will preserve your existing data and settings.

Q: I’m a registered user of ServerSentinel. My computer has crashed lately and I had to retrieve the set up files from your customer area again. But I don't know my installation password anymore. Can you please help me?

A: If you log into the customer area, you will find you installation password in the upper left, below the Download button.

Q: What is the precise difference between a single user licence and a 5-user licence?

A: Single user licenses are meant for single workspaces and personal use, multi-user licenses allow you to use multiple installations of the software at the same time and they are cheaper than the same number of single user licenses.

For further information on licenses, please visit: https://www.jam-software.de/customers/licenseAgreement.php

Q: What's a "screen shot", and how can I produce one ?

A: A "screen shot" or "screen capture" is an image file containing a "photo" of your current screen display. Usually, it shows the currently active dialog of your application and can help us to help you.

To take a screen shot (or a "screeny" for short) proceed as follows:

1. Make the dialog you want to depict the active window in the foreground by left-clicking on it. If possible, maximize that window / dialog.

2. Now hold down the Alt-key and press the PrintScreen-key. Here you can find the keys on your keyboard :

keyboard4

Now the screen shot is stored in the Windows clipboard storage. You can retrieve the image, if you select Paste from the context menu in every graphic capable program, e.g. Microsoft Outlook.

3. You can insert the image right away in your support request email. As long as it remains in the clipboard, you can paste it into the body of your email, simply by using the Paste command from the context menu.

If you cannot (for whatever reason) paste the image directly into the mail, you can paste it as well into a Microsoft Word document. Just open a new Word document, right-click on the new sheet and select Paste from the context menu.

Q: How do I set up my hotmail account to be used by the email action?

A: This is possible since version 1.2 of ServerSentinel, if you are using an older version, please upgrade first.
If you configure the email action, set
- mail server (SMTP) to: smtp.live.com
- secure authentication: TLS
- enter username and password
The password length is restricted to 16 characters, in case you had entered a longer password when creating your account just truncate it to 16 characters otherwise an "authentication failed" error will occur.
If you encountered a "connection timed out" error check your firewall settings.

Q: How do I set up my google mail account to be used by the email action?

A: If you configure the email action, set
- mail server (SMTP) to: smtp.gmail.com
- port to 587
- secure authentication: TLS
- enter username and password
If you encountered a "connection timed out" error check your firewall settings.

Q: How do I set up KerioMailServer to be used by the email action?

A: To use the KerioMailServer as Mail Server, please deactivate the DIGEST-MD5 authentication method in the settings of the KerioMailServer.

Q: What's the difference between a Disk Sensor and a WMI Disk Sensor?

A: The WMI Sensor is able to query the size of the hard disk on remote machines, while the Disk Sensor is only able to check the local disk the service runs on.

Q: I set up ServerSentinel on my workstation which went into sleep mode and stopped collecting information. Can I install it on my file server which is always on but still be able to connect to it from my workstation?

A: This is possible, however it should only be done by advanced users because we currently do not provide a way to configure this setting via the graphical user interface.
If you are interested in such a configuration, we recommend this procedure:

Stop the service and close the UI. In your ServerSentinel installation folder you will find the sub folder \cfg\ containing the file configuration.xml. Open this file with an editor of your choice and replace the SQLite configuration item either by:

<Server>[yourdbserver]</Server>

<Database>ServerSentinel</Database>

<Password>[password]</Password>

</Configuration>

or by e.g.,

<Server>testserver</Server>

<Catalog>ServerSentinel</Catalog>

</Configuration>

The system always takes the first configuration item in the <ArrayOfConfiguration> tag to configure the database.

Using an external DB may additionally increase performance for large installations.

Install the software on both of your systems and setup the above configuration file for both of the installations. If you choose MySQL as database, go to MySQL download section and get the latest MySQL Connector/Net, place the MySql.Data.dll into the \bin directory next to the other binaries in both of the installations. Please make sure, that you've created a MySQL catalog named "ServerSentinel" with the correct access permissions.

Now you can restart your server installation of ServerSentinel. Stopping and restarting the sentinel service remotely is currently impossible, but you can start the system by selecting ServerSentinel | Maintenance | Recreate database scheme in the server's Windows Start Menu and by creating a new table structure this way. Be sure to check the log files like service.log.txt file after starting the service on your monitoring machine to see whether the installation caused any trouble.

We currently cannot provide extensive support for this feature since it is not available to a bigger audience yet.

Q: Can ServerSentinel use SQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008?

A: Yes, since version 1.3, ServerSentinel supports SQLite, MySQL and MSSQL (2000, 2005 and 2008).

Q: What is the expected transaction throughput and size of a SQL database?

A: The database size is growing linearly depending on how many sensors have been configured and how frequent they perform checks on their end points. As a rule of thumb each sensor will perform around 5 transactions on each check. If it has been configured to a check interval of 5 minutes, this is an average of one transaction per sensor and per minute.
Performing data review and analyzing with the user interface may cause additional traffic on the database.

Q: Can ServerSentinel perform email notification rotation so the particular admin on call is notified?

A: The application does not yet support this out-of-the box. You can however script this if you configured e.g. a MySQL database.
The service is able to recognize modification and will reload it’s settings
A MySQL statement would look like this:

update actionnotificationemail set recipients="yourrecipient@xyz.com" where notificationaction_id = (Select id from `action` where name="RotateEmail1")

you need to set the name of the email action to “RotateEmail1” in that case and you can then rotate the recipients by replacing the recipient email. To make the ServerSentinel service reload the settings, the version field of the sensors in question need to be incremented;

update executiontask set version=version+1 where name="Script-Sensor"

to increment all version fields at once:

update executiontask set version=version+1

The complete MySQL batch command would be (ServerSentinel is the database name):

C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.1\bin>mysql -b --user=YourUsername --password=YourPassword ServerSentinel --execute="update executiontask set version=version+1"

Q: Can we use a combination of server agents and clients to perform the checking

A: This is a planned feature, currently only one user interface and one service installation is supported.

Q: When performing an operating system event log check on a Windows 200X server for any errors in the application event log, does ServerSentinel return the description of the event log found? Or, does it return just that a failure was noted?

A: For such a task, use the Script Sensor to execute a particular WMI Query; Create a script 'eventlog.vbs'

Const CONVERT_TO_LOCAL_TIME = True

Set dtmStart = CreateObject("WbemScripting.SWbemDateTime")

dtmNew = DateAdd("s", -120*60, Now)

dtmStart.SetVarDate dtmNew, CONVERT_TO_LOCAL_TIME

strComputer = "."

Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:\\" & strComputer & "\root\CIMV2")

strWMI_Time = dtmStart

Wscript.Echo "SELECT * FROM Win32_NTLogEvent WHERE TimeGenerated > " & strWMI_Time & ""

Set colItems = objWMIService.ExecQuery( _

"SELECT * FROM Win32_NTLogEvent WHERE TimeGenerated > '" & strWMI_Time & "'",,48)

For Each objItem in colItems

Wscript.Echo objItem.EventType & "|" & objItem.EventCode & "|" & objItem.Message

It’s possible to enhance the query to only select errors from the event log:

… WHERE EventType = '1' and TimeGenerated > '" & strWMI_Time & "'"

If you configure ServerSentinel to execute the script e.g. every hour by using the script sensor

Executable:
C:\WINDOWS\system32\cscript.exe
Working Directory:
<the directory that contains the .vbs file>
Program Arguments:
//NoLogo //T:3 "<Directory>\x.vbs"

The sensor will get you a string in the output stream.

Q: I cannot get the "net send" action to run, what's wrong with it?

A: Please start the RPC Service on the machine that you want to send a message to. Since Windows Vista the "net send" API isn't available anymore hence the net send action is disabled.