Installation guide

Accessing Diagnostic Tools 23-53
Chapter 23: Continuing System Administration
Wave Global Administrator Guide
Using the Uptime utility
Microsoft’s Uptime is the Windows Server 2003 utility that allows you to estimate server
availability. Uptime processes the machine's event log to determine system availability and
current uptime. The target system can either be the local system or a remote system.
Note: Many factors affect Uptime’s calculations, and the results displayed by this utility should
be considered estimates.
Potential sources of error include:
• All calculations are based on the entries in the event log. If the system time is altered
significantly, this can have a dramatic affect on the calculations made. Additionally if the
event logs have been cleared, or have filled, such that additional events cannot be written,
this will also affect this tools ability to accurately estimate system availability.
• The system heartbeat is generally written every 5 minutes, so the amount of downtime
calculated for abnormal outages is limited in accuracy to this window.
• Systems that are a member of a cluster are currently unsupported by Uptime.
• If Uptime detects that the target system may be a member of a cluster, Uptime will
display a message stating that the results may be in error.
For further information about this utility, please see:
http://support.Microsoft.com/support and reference KB Article: Q232243
Note the following:
• Availability calculations require:
• Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 4 or higher, including Windows 2000.
• The system heartbeat must be active.
The system heartbeat is a date/time stamp that is written to the system registry at a fixed
interval. This heartbeat is available in Service Pack 4 or higher. It is enabled by default on
Windows NT Server. Since the heartbeat causes the registry to be written to the disk at
regular intervals, it can interfere with systems running various forms of power
management.
Release 2.0
September 2010