With our successful mini-pilot under our belt, CSC moved forward with the installation of our first group of servers. As we were continuing to secure permission and approvals for our change requests, we decided to proceed with the deployment as a rolling installation, instead of as a single group.  The NightWatchman Server Edition agent was installed on 34 servers on the first pass.  This allowed us to begin gathering data on the servers while the agent ran in the background, securing baseline information for the project team to analyze sooner.

While completing ourinstallations, we ran into an issue with our firewalls.  One of the servers experienced an issue where the agent was trying to communicate with the NightWatchman Server Edition web service, but was unable to get the information through because the required firewall port was not open.  During the period of time when the agent could not communicate with the server, it continued to generate messages in the event log. This persisted over the weekend and resulted in a large number of events being created on the affected server.

Our engineers located the problem, and their solution was to update the firewall security settings and open the required port.  For subsequent installations, we ensured that these settings were updated in advance as part of our change request.

To support mass deployments in the future, and allow for ease of co-ordination between agent installation and firewall updates, 1E plans to update the agent.  The planned update will allow the agent to remain ‘silent’, and not attempt to connect with NightWatchmanServer Edition, but to collect data in the background for a period of time.  During the delay, the firewall settings can be updated.  Once the changeis completed, the agent can connect, and report the collected data from the days it was silent.

Ourplan was to collect data for a minimum of 30 days to create a baseline view of the activity and useful work of our servers. We began this baseline with the original 34 servers, still running the agent. During this period we will continue to install the agent on our remaining identified servers.