A more technical article today.
In adding some more Exchange Monitoring we ran into some issues, and solutions, that may help others. Some things in recent Exchange versions can only be monitored by Powershell. (Perfmon, WMI, Powershell, all needed for different versions of Exchange…. I wish they’d make up their mind…)
So the first issue was that Powershell scripts, when called from a LogicMonitor agent, never returned. This wasn’t too hard – simply pass the parameter -inputformat with the (undocumented) option “none”, and the agent can successfully run Powershell commands:
powershell -inputformat none dbstatus.ps1
(Why? The Microsoft.PowerShell.ConsoleHost class constructs a M.PS.WrappedDeserializer passing the STDIN TextReader as one of the parameters. By default, the WrappedDeserializer will call ReadLine() on this STDIN TextReader and wait indefinitely, effectively hanging PowerShell and the calling process. That’s why.)
So past that hurdle, but the next one:
>> powershell -inputformat none dbstatus.ps1
Add-PSSnapin : No snap-ins have been registered for Windows PowerShell version 2.
Yet running the exact same command from the command shell on the host running the agent resulted in the output we were expecting. And we could see the Exchange snap in, called by the Powershell script, was correctly registered, and in fact worked fine.
But.. our agent was running on a 32 bit JVM and Exchange 2010 (in our lab, at least) is installed on 64 bit Windows. The Powershell snap in was only visible when powershell was started from a 64 bit app. When I started powershell from the cmd.exe in SysWOW64, I got the same error about missing snap-ins as our agent reported.
The solution – it doesn’t matter that our agent was installed as a 32 bit app, in Program files (x86). What mattered was that the Java virtual machine launched by the agent, that ultimately launched Powershell, be a 64 bit JVM, not the default 32 bit JVM installed from Java.com. (At least, a 32 bit JVM is the default when you browse to Java.com with a 32 bit browser.)
So, running the LogicMonitor agent with a 64 bit JVM, and Powershell started with “-inputformat none” gives us full access to Powershell output and all its snap ins, so expect some datasources released very shortly to take advantage of that.