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Anyone know of a quick way to find SAM components to trim to get under license cap?

I'm a new SW admin for our company; the previous departed quite some time ago, so there are TONS of things (including *way* too many highly important production servers!) that were never monitored.

I performed what I feel was very conservative autodiscovery - knowing full well there would be a lots of stuff to trim.

But, I never expected it to be THIS (below) bad!  I will definitely go after more licenses, but it won't happen for months, perhaps next calendar year.  Anyone have any advice?

The number of available licenses for SAM Components is low.

Maximum licenses allowed for SAM Components: 700.
Licenses currently in use: 2714.
Licenses currently available: 0.

  • Go to Settings > SAM Settings > Manage Application Monitors. Either delete the templates you don't need OR edit the application monitor and remove the component monitors you don't need for now

  • on a side note: My rule of thumb is calculate 20 components per server when you don't want to think about trimming your templates. with your SAM700 you would have approximately 35-40 servers "hassle-free"

  • A lot of the templates provide relatively more 'robust' monitoring than you absolutely need if you are license constrained.  As an example, for internal websites or things that aren't under active development the appinsight for IIS template is 30 licenses and gives way more metrics than most monitoring teams really need. Swap those out for a simple http(s) monitor of the url for 1 license. 

    Remove the appinsight for sql from any SQLEXPRESS instances since most systems that are low impact enough to not need a full licensed SQL are probably not critical enough to justify 50 licenses, and even if something is "wrong" with the performance your DBA is likely not even managing most express instances.

    If you get creative with scripts you can actually condense a lot of the components down.  Instead of checking a dozen services or ports at a cost of 1 license each write a script that checks them all and just reports back with a metric of how many are down as the statistic, and concat the names of any failures into the Message:

    None of this is going to be instant since you will have to comb through things to figure out where you can trim unfortunately, but I find that if you are conservative you can get your count WAY down from where a discovery would set it. 

    -Marc Netterfield

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