Back during Tech Ed I was approached by the brand-new British publication IT EXPERT to pen a piece on "Monitoring Servers Remotely". That piece was just released last week. It focuses on the ways to monitor performance, connect to the desktop, view Event Log information and remotely launch commands, and even includes a few screencasts that explain the more complex setups. From the piece:

The daily 'care and feeding' of managing and monitoring Windows servers can take enough of your time when those servers are on the other side of the building. But, when they're on the other side of the city or even the world, your daily activities grow ever more challenging.

When Windows servers aren't easily accessible directly through their native console, the traditional mechanisms for managing them don't work as well or in some cases don't work at all. Clicking 'Next, Next, Finish' to install applications, bringing up the Event Viewer to check on server health, verifying performance through PerfMon; all become more challenging when you're far removed from the physical systems themselves. And as always, the tools are subtly different with Windows Server 2008. Especially when you have a wide range of customers each with different systems, you need a different way of thinking if you're to stay on top of the administrative requirements of servers spread across multiple locations.

Before getting into the specifics of how to simplify these administrative tasks, it's worth thinking about how you can organise them. The actual management and monitoring of Windows servers breaks down into a fairly discrete set of tasks, each of which you can approach in ways that make sense in remote server scenarios.

I just received my copy of the print magazine in the mail late last week and I'm impressed wth the layout. It reminds me of the layout the old Windows 2000 Magazine used years ago, but with a much slicker result.

Check out the magazine here. You can read my article and watch the screencasts here.