1.0 ZENworks Diagnostics and Probe tool Overview

The Primary Server is the central piece in the ZENworks Configuration Management architecture. The Primary Server is the source of getting information about the devices managed by the zone. Primary server is where an administrators performs all administrative tasks in the zone, through the ZENworks Control Center interface. The Primary Server is responsible for all the communication between the Database and the User Sources in the zone. Due to these responsibilities, the Primary Server can also become the single point of failure in the zone and therefore it is essential that we monitor the state of the ZENworks activity on the servers from time to time.

ZENworks Control Center has a diagnostics dashboard that allows the administrator to monitor and diagnose the state of Primary Servers. This uses the ZENworks Probe tool, an open source diagnostics toolkit, which is useful in monitoring and troubleshooting problems with Java process.

Using ZENworks Diagnostics, it is possible to use the ZENworks Control Center interface to inspect and debug the state of the ZENworks servers in the zone. ZENworks Diagnostics provides the ZENworks Administrator an intuitive portal to check the state of the LDAP sources (eDirectory or Active Directory) and also provides a probe feature wherein the different processes running on the ZENworks Server can further be analyzed or debug information could be collected very easily and provided to Novell Technical Services for analysis. Therefore, Diagnostics will help to narrow down on any specific issues within the ZENworks zone.