Have you ever wondered which is the real difference among different offerings besides the fact that your applications run on a shared server? In fact, most of the times, this seems to be a tricky question because most service providers describe the boundaries and limits of their services based on the following common parameters:

• The resource type and quota: storage, bandwidth, mail boxes, mail lists, FTP accounts, database instances, etc.
• The underlying platform: Windows (IIS/Apache) or Linux (Apache) under whichever version.
• The amount of run-time services for your applications: .NET, PHP, Ruby, Perl, Python, Node.js, CGI/FastCGI, etc.
• The amount of libraries and components that are available to your applications.
• A library of pre-assembled web applications: CMSs, blogs, wikis, forums, ticketing systems, e-commerce sites, etc.
• Additional tools/services: web control panel, web analytics, SEO Tools, backup, additional security services (Anti-spam, SSL, etc.), version control, payment services, etc.
• And, of course, the degree of server sharing with other digital neighbors.

And, many times, the resources available allow us to deploy more than one application and, of course, we can’t figure out how much computing power we can use regardless how heavy our applications really are.

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Several months ago, I happened to share a nice conversation about the potential of PowerShell as part of the IT/Enterprise Architecture. Then I discovered that the benefits of architecting IT-aware Applications are still widely unknown or misunderstood. That’s the reason I would like to share my thoughts on this subject pointing out the special role that PowerShell can play in this field.

IT-aware Services and Applications

IT-aware Services and Applications incorporate the necessary instrumentation so that IT and Operations Teams can control, monitor, diagnose and operate them using the same semantics that the business uses in addition to the classic IT constructs and abstractions.

These utilities allow IT and Operations to be aligned more efficiently with the business because the own business concepts are completely integrated with the environment and the tools that both IT and Operations use to do their work.

This Instrumentation Stack can be break down into different components or services that need to be implemented inside the applications:

1. Activity Tracking and Performance Monitoring. In the Microsoft world, this is usually implemented as Logging Facilities (Log4net, Enterprise Library Logging Application Block, etc.), Performance Counters and ETW Providers.
2. Command and Control: PowerShell in the Microsoft ecosystem.



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Today I would like to explain a little bit what Session Stores are for the NMAgent and, therefore, what a Personal Session Store is. A Session Store is a database table that holds the information from your Agent Sessions when you have tell him to do so. Every run command invocation fires a new Agent Session and you have the option to persist the results in a database if you issue the -save parameter as well on the CLI.

Since version 4.54b0 you can choose your Session Store and define its name on your Profile Settings. Consequently, you will notice that several new parameters are present in all your settings-<ProfileName>.ps1 files. These are:

$AgentUserId           = 18              # My OpenSLIM Contact UserId
$AgentUserName         = 'cveira'        # A label to distinguish my Sessions
$AgentUserSessionStore = '_SessionStore' # The table to store my Sessions

These parameters become useful when you share your Session Database with one or more IT Teams. It is also handy when you schedule NMAgent sessions for regular execution and want to distinguish the automated sessions from your interactive ones.

The default Session Store is _SessionStore and this is the reason why all the predefined Profile Settings refer to it.

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