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Exploring the ISA Server 2004 Dashboard
The Dashboard is a brand new feature in ISA Server 2004, and it's a handy way for the ISA Server administrator to tell, at a glance, what's going on in all the various monitoring subnodes. For more detailed information, you can click on the individual tabs for Alerts, Sessions, Services, Reports, Connectivity, and Logging, but if you want a 'big picture' view, the Dashboard provides it in a single interface. The default Dashboard configuration on an ISA Server 2004 Standard Edition machine is shown in Figure 12.1.
Figure 12.1: The Dashboard on an ISA Server 2004 Standard Edition Computer
The Dashboard also provides you with system performance information. For example, you are able to see, in graph format, the number of packets allowed per second (times 10) and the number of packets dropped per second.Each of the Dashboard sections contains an icon that indicates the status of that area:
Checkmark inside a green circle: indicates that all is okay
Exclamation point inside a yellow triangle: indicates a warning
X inside a red circle: indicates a problem or potential problem
You can think of the Dashboard as the starting point for identifying any problems or issues that the ISA Server might be having. You can also perform some tasks, such as resetting alert instances, directly from the Dashboard interface.You can 'roll up' various sections of the Dashboard if you don't want to view them. Just click the icon in the top right corner of the section you want to 'roll up' (a circle with two small up-pointing arrows) and the section will 'roll up,' making more room for other sections. In Figure 12.2, the Connectivity, Reports and Alerts sections are 'rolled up.'
Figure 12.2: 'Rolling up' Dashboard sections
Dashboard Sections
The default Dashboard is divided into six sections:
Connectivity
Services
Reports
Alerts
Sessions
System Performance
Let's take a closer look at each of the Dashboard sections.
Dashboard Connectivity Section
The Connectivity section of the Dashboard allows you to monitor connections between the ISA server machine and other computers. You can monitor specific computers on the network, or even a connection to a particular Web server, by URL. However, before you can monitor connections to specific computers, you will need to create a connectivity verifier and assign it to a group. Until you do this, the Dashboard Connectivity section will show all group types as 'Not configured,' as shown in Figure 12.3.
Figure 12.3: Default Connectivity Status Prior to Creating Connectivity Verifiers
The groups to which computers can be assigned include the following:
Active Directory
DHCP
DNS
Published Servers
Web (Internet)
After you've created one or more connectivity verifiers and assigned them to groups, the status will be shown for the configured group type, as shown in Figure 12.4.
Figure 12.4: Connectivity Status Shown After Creation of Connectivity Verifier
We discuss how to create connectivity verifiers in the section titled Monitoring ISA Server 2004 Connectivity, Sessions and Services later in this chapter.
Dashboard Services Section
The Services section of the Dashboard makes it easy for you to quickly check the status of the services that are running on the ISA Server computer. The following services are installed during the installation of the ISA Server 2004 software:
The firewall service
The ISA Server Control service
The ISA Server Job Scheduler service
The Microsoft Data Engine (MSDE)
We discuss each of these services in more detail in the section titled Monitoring ISA Server Connectivity, Sessions and Services later in this chapter.
From the Services section of the Dashboard (see Figure 12.5), you can view the status of each service (whether it is currently started or stopped).
Figure 12.5: The Services Section of the ISA Server 2004 Dashboard
Dashboard Reports Section
The Reports section of the Dashboard tells you, at a glance, the names of reports that have been generated, their status (generating or completed), and the date of generation, as shown in Figure 12.6.
Figure 12.6: The Reports Section of the ISA Server 2004 Dashboard
This section is handy for determining whether scheduled or manually generated reports have finished generating. You can open a listed report (if it has been completed) from the Dashboard interface by double-clicking its name in the Report Name column.We discuss how to schedule automated report jobs, how to manually generate reports, and how to customize the content of reports in the section titled Working with ISA Server 2004 Logs and Reports later in this chapter.
Dashboard Alerts Section
The Alerts section of the Dashboard interface allows you to quickly determine the events that have been logged on the ISA Server computer, when each event occurred, the severity of the event (Information, Warning or Error), and the number of new instances when this event has occurred. If you look in the Application log of the Windows Event Viewer (Start | Administrative Tools | Event Viewer), you'll see that the events displayed in the ISA Server 2004 Dashboard Alerts section are also shown there. In the Event Viewer, they will be shown with Microsoft Firewall as the source of the event, as shown in Figure 12.7.
Figure 12.7: Event Viewer Logs Show the Firewall Service Events Displayed on the Dashboard
Dashboard Sessions Section
The Sessions section of the ISA Server 2004 Dashboard makes it easy to see, at a glance, the session types and number of sessions that are currently active through the ISA Server 2004 firewall that is being monitored. This includes the following session types:
Firewall clients
SecureNAT clients
Web Proxy clients
VPN Remote clients
VPN site-to-site connections
VPN quarantined clients
The total number of sessions is also shown, as you can see in Figure 12.8.
Figure 12.8: The Sessions section of the ISA Server 2004 Dashboard (Standard Edition)
You can open the Sessions tab from the Dashboard interface to view details about each individual session by double-clicking the title bar of the Sessions section. We will discuss how to use the information on the Sessions tab in the section titled Monitoring ISA Server 2004 Connectivity, Sessions and Services later in this chapter.
Dashboard System Performance Section
The System Performance section of the ISA Server 2004 Dashboard interface provides a 'quickie' view of the two most important performance counters for ISA Server:
Allowed packets per second (times 10)
Dropped packets per second
As shown in Figure 12.9, these counters are displayed in graph form on the Dashboard.
Figure 12.9: The System Performance Section of the ISA Server 2004 Dashboard
These same counters, along with a number of other counters specific to ISA Server 2004, are displayed by default in the ISA Server Performance Monitor console that is installed during the installation of the ISA Server 2004 software, as shown in Figure 12.10.
Figure 12.10: ISA Server Performance Monitor with Default Counters
| Note | The screenshots of the ISA Server Dashboard and the ISA Server Performance Monitor both show activity that occurred when Web sites were accessed through the ISA server. |
We will discuss how to use the ISA Server 2004 Performance Monitor in the section titled Using ISA Server 2004's Performance Monitor later in this chapter.
Configuring and Customizing the Dashboard
You can change the look of the Dashboard to suit your own preferences. As mentioned earlier, you can 'roll up' or 'unroll' any of the sections by clicking on the up or down pointing arrows in the upper right of the section.You can also customize which columns are shown in each section by right-clicking one of the column headers (for example, Status) and selecting or deselecting column names.To make more room for the Dashboard, you can close the console tree on the left by clicking its icon in the toolbar, and/or you can close the task pane on the right by clicking the right-pointing arrow between the Dashboard and task pane.Once you have the Dashboard configured the way you want, you can use it as your 'front page' overview of what's happening on your ISA server. Then you can drill down to the individual section tabs to get more detailed information. In the following sections, we show you how to use the tools you'll find on those tabs to create and configure all of ISA Server 2004's monitoring, logging, reporting and alerting functions.
