The Low Down on Viridity EnergyCenter Management Protocols

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Viridity Software prides itself on the use of industry standard management protocols that are both managed by open standard organizations as well as vendor specific protocols. This gives us a distinct advantage because we have designed Viridity EnergyCenter to work in all data centers. EnergyCenter is vendor agnostic, meaning it will work the same with Windows servers as it will with Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers and OpenBSD servers.  EnergyCenter can even be installed on Windows and Linux.

WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation)

WMI is Microsoft Window’s implementation of WBEM (Web-Based Enterprise Management) and CIM (Common Information Model). All versions of windows since Windows 2000 have the WMI service installed by default.

The three important aspects of WMI that should be known are
Namespaces, Queries, and Security.

Namespaces (targets):

Basically you need to point at something to ask it a question. You point with a ‘moniker’. It contains the target machine and then the namespace on that machine.

“winmgmts:\\localhost\root\CIMV2”

Some namespaces are: SECURITY, directory, CIMV2, RSOP, SmsDm, and SecurityCenter. Some of these acronyms might seems familiar and that’s because they are.

Queries (questions):

To ask the namespace for something you send is a proper question such as the following.

SELECT state FROM win32_service WHERE Name=’wuauserv’

In English this is “tell me if Automatic Update is on right now.”

Security:

At a basic level you connect to another computer the same way you connect to a file share or a shared printer. If you can connect to a computer via “\\server\share” then you can read it’s WMI data. The access permissions are controlled for each namespace with the windows standard Discretionary Access Control Lists (DACLs).

SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol)

SNMP is a standard managed by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force). It is a default part of any serious piece of networking equipment. It is installed on Microsoft Windows Servers but not enabled by default.

There are 3 important aspects of SNMP, Namespaces, and Security.

MIB (target)

The layout of data that you can get with SNMP is called a MIB (Management Information Base). You need to connect to an machine’s SNMP agent and then it will use a MIB to look up data on that machine.  Inside MIBs are objects organized in a tree.

Queries (questions)

To get data from a MIB you have to query for specific information in the following forms:

ASN.1:   “.1.3.6.1.2.1.25.3.3.1.2”

or

“.iso.org.dod.internet.mgmt.mib-2.host.hrDevice.hrProcessorTable.hrProcessorEntry.hrProcessorLoad”

In English, this is “Get the CPU utilization for each processor”

Security

For the most supported version, Version 2 is used. In Version 2, a Community String is used to access the SNMP service of a machine. The default Community String on most devices is ‘public’ and it is allowed read-only access. Each Community String can have it’s own access level.

-Joseph Paul Cohen, Viridity Engineering Team