In this demonstration, we'll work with system insights in Windows server.
As I mentioned, the front end for system insights is Windows Admin Center.
So here we are in WAC.
I just happen to be connected to the gateway.
I have mem1 configured as a gateway,
and one of the things that I always evangelize is the update ability here.
A new update is available, go to Settings.
Well that's kind of cool.
So it looks like coincidentally,
there is a new version of Windows Admin Center that
populated just today before I started working.
Well,
I'm not going to update WAC now because I don't want
to throw anything into question.
Instead, let's take a look here at let's go into mem2,
just 1 of my member servers that I've onboarded here into WAC.
And the first thing you'll want to do actually is install the service.
So we'll go to Settings and then we'll go to Extensions,
and I already have it installed.
Come down to system in the Ss, System Insights right here.
And so you just look that up under Available extensions,
you click Install, and you're good to go.
And then you can see here, as I mentioned,
the extensible nature of WAC means that as Microsoft and other vendors
create different capabilities via the extension model,
you can keep them current either automatically or manually what
I just did by clicking the Update button.
Alright, nice.
So let's go back to where we were.
Let's see, I kind of forgot where I was.
So let's go back to All connections.
Oh yes, mem2, right.
So let's go back to mem2,
and I'm going to look up System insights in the Tools list.
When you first come in here, there is a button to install the service.
Remember, all of this is on Windows server.
We're not dealing with any subscriptions in the cloud or anything like that.
And once you've installed the service,
we have this interface that shows your capabilities and these are the
four default capabilities that I told you about.
And what happens here is that for each one of those,
you'll want to enable them and then make sure to invoke
them to actually start it running.
I have invoked all four so they're enabled,
the status is OK,
and we can see when they were last run and what the current description is.
So it looks like I'm good, and I'm not surprised at all that
the forecasting here is going to be within my available
capacity because this is a quiet server,
but on one of your production servers,
the idea is you can get important proactive information regarding any of
these subsystems and that will help you avoid a potential downtime event
in terms of hardware on your server going bad,
you see.
So what we can do is go to Settings, and for each one of those capabilities,
we can set on the schedule whether you want to
enable or disable the predictions.
You can adjust the time grain for measurement minute, hourly, or daily.
I have mine set very aggressively because I wanted to
surface data to you as quickly as I could,
and then we have the days on which an evaluation will take place,
and then we have prediction interval in minutes,
specifies the number of minutes between predictions.
So every 5 minutes, there is a new prediction on this system.
We go to Actions.
This allows us to optionally run PowerShell scripts automatically.
So this ties in a bit with built‑in alerting capabilities in WAC,
and so whenever a particular status were to change,
you could fire off a particular script and pass credentials optionally.
If we click Browse example scripts,
it takes us out to the Microsoft tech community,
this particular blog post, and it looks like,
oh boy, this is an old fashioned page where we could do alerting,
reporting, etc, etc, etc.
That's not as clean of an interface as I was hoping.
As you can see up here, in the WAC global navigation,
there is a View PowerShell scripts button,
and then for each tool, this is where the scripts really should show up.
I think, I'm just making an educated guess,
that this really should invoke this panel and Microsoft,
hopefully by the time you're watching this lesson,
may have some system insights sample scripts that you can work with,
but it looks like that's not the case quite yet.
Okay, so let's back out of here and let's go back to our capability list.
The idea with these capabilities, let me actually go back,
is if we open the menu here, Add and remove capabilities,
I'm thinking that over time we're going to see more,
initially from Microsoft,
but potentially eventually by third‑party independent software vendors.
As a matter of fact, you can see that in my list here,
I have two not installed that are related to physical disk anomalies,
latency and IOPs values, and I can select these,
install them, and bring those extra capabilities into scope,
and that would just simply add more capabilities.
And again, this is on a server‑by‑server basis.
We're looking only on mem2.timw.info in System Insights.
So let's come back to the home page here,
and I haven't done anything with this one yet,
so we can select the new anomaly, we can invoke,
we can go to Settings, which again, allows you to do your schedule,
invoke to actually start a run, failed to make a prediction.
Oh, maybe it's not enabled.
No, it is enabled.
Maybe we need to reboot.
Again,
this speaks to the fact that when you're dealing with
capabilities that are under active development,
you should expect to see bugs from time to time,
but what's especially cool is Microsoft does so much of their work
and their engineering out in the open at GitHub,
you very likely can report issues directly to them and hopefully those reports
will be triaged and acted upon sooner rather than later.
The last thing you probably want to see is what do the actual
recommendations and forecasts look like.
That's where you, in System Insights, click a specific capability,
and we can see over time here that after an initial burst of 75% CPU,
this machine has really been pretty quiet ever since.
And then for each prediction, it's going to let you know,
and again,
I'm not expecting to see anything other than that the
CP usage is forecasted to remain, but if that were to change,
we know that we can be proactively notified via PowerShell,
and the same thing applies here to networking as you can see.
Again, very quiet situation here, and then we've got some storage consumption,
pretty basic, pretty standard.
It might be interesting, this just occurred to me,
to on a lab system use tools like CpuStres from Sysinternals or
just maybe load the virtual hard disk of the machine so it becomes
constrained of space to invoke the movement of a system insights
prediction to another status.
I'll give that to you as a homework assignment. How's that sound?