As part of supporting a software system which is in production, the support people usually keep track of a lot of information about the production servers. This information may have to do with hardware (how much physical memory is installed, what is the capacity of hard drives) or with software (what version of .Net is installed, how much have the tables of the production database grown, what are the versions of the .Net assemblies deployed). With the complexity of even small scale solutions growing every day, system information can become important for the support personnel. Unfortunately in the majority of cases no particular methodology is used to extract and keep track of such vital information.

System Info Reporter (SIR) was designed to be a tool which can be used to provide such information. Implemented as a .Net console executable, SIR tries to provide a small footprint and is meant for scheduled or manual execution. Once run, SIR scans the server it runs on (or other servers) and collects information. That information is written out to system information reports which can be sent to support or monitoring personnel on a regular basis, creating a trail that shows the current state of the server.

Limitations:

· Considering the fact that SIR can gather information from a lot of sources in a batch-mode manner and generate a report, it is a good tool to use for that job. However, SIR is in no way a substitute for more tight monitoring of a server and that's the main reason why there is no Performance Counter collector. If perfmon seems more like the tool to use for a monitoring job, then it's certain that SIR is not a good alternative.