Credentials for Monitoring

fkeough

Having inherited a SolarWinds server installation I am trying to work through some issues.

Currently we have multiple customers and domains we monitor across.

I have some issues with credentials that I was hoping to get answers to...

1. for monitoring client applications we have been using domain administrator level accounts,

I feel this could be a little excessive, but reading the admin guide and SAM guide the only info I can

find is in regards for User Domain Tracking, which is not what I am wanting to do.

Should the monitoring account be a local administrator on the server?

What about monitoring SQL and Exchange Servers, I am guessing the account should be an SA account of some type.

Thanks

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MTorok

Frank,

I'm going to move this into the SAM forum where you'll probably get more product-specific eyes on it.

Thanks,

Michael

aLTeReGo

The best answer is to use an account with adequate permissions. It just so happens that the local Administrator is the only account in Windows that by default that has adequate permissions to query WMI objects or Windows Performance Counters. We do have a KB article that outlines the steps required to grant a non-administrator account adequate permissions for monitoring, but generally most customers create a local or domain service account for the sole purpose of monitoring.

As for SQL, you can also grant read-only permissions to a specific SQL account to for the purposes of monitoring. SAM doesn't make any changes or require write access, but it will need read access to sys.dm_os_performance_counters tables, which is restricted to "sa" or equivalent users by default.

mmonge

Is there any other view, procedure, table, etc., that the account will need outside from ys.dm_os_performance_counters tables?

aLTeReGo

The SQL Server 2005-2008 Performance (SQL) Template requires read access to the following tables/views

sys.dm_os_performance_counters
sys.dm_db_partition_stats
sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats
sys.dm_exec_requests

mmonge

Thanks for the response aLTeReGo.