We’re wrapping up 2014 with a huge, heavily requested show topic: managing Dameware® across the enterprise! The Geeks will detail how to get three great new extra features up and running in Dameware. Covering topics from centralizing your licensing, to synchronizing host lists, to using the Internet Proxy, the Mobile Gateway Server and more. Who doesn't like two-way access from the web? (Especially on the weekends!)
Join Patrick Hubbard, Lawrence Garvin, Thomas LaRock, and Leon Adato, along with Dameware Product Marketing Manager Glenn Gray, who knows a thing or three about Dameware. Glenn will do a five-minute how-to on activating the Dameware Web Help Desk® integration.
Episode Transcript
Hi, I'm Thomas LaRock.
I'm Leon Adato.
I'm Patrick Hubbard.
And I'm Lawrence Garvin and welcome to SolarWinds Lab with the quatro geeks. We have yet another episode today that comes directly from topics suggestions for the show.
That's right, ripped from the pages of breaking THWACK community news.
And it's not law and order, special admins unit, if that's what you're going with.
Kind of.
Nope, today's show is all about Dameware, and specifically, how to set up the Central Server, Mobile Proxy and Internet Gateway.
That's right, an entire how to episode on advanced use of Dameware.
That's cool and, so how did our viewers provide this feedback.
Well, they provided lots and lots of comments at lab.solarwinds.com and of course, for those of you who are watching live, you see this great big chat box over here. We're all live chatting with you during the show and for those of you who aren't, it's an opportunity to sign up for reminders, so things like our lab 16 service pack one episode, which sort of appeared out of nowhere. Everyone that attended that, got to know about it through that sign up notification. So, definitely visit our site and keep your feedback coming, because you are really now driving every single one of these episodes.
So, I've been using Dameware for a really long time. Actually, before it became part of the SolarWinds suite, but when I was using it, we only had five admins, so we didn't use the DCS.
Yeah, so again, you know, we're going to de-jargonify here, so D-C-S, is Dameware Central Server.
DCS, that will help, because we're probably going to that about 20 times in this show.
At least.
Or 30.
And that reminds me, so I'm guessing, we didn't rename the Dameware NT utilities, to Dameware remote support, just because then the abbreviation would have been DNTU.
Correct.
Correct, we did this in honor of NT's 80th birthday.
Hey, NT pretty much saved Microsoft as we know it.
Okay.
All right.
Okay, so on our last episode, folks saw on Log and Event manager, LEM, we admitted that, you know, we're pretty decent at administering it, setting up filters and rules and that kind of thing. But when it comes down to it, we were not nearly as gururific, as Rob Johnson was, right.
So that's true, but I mean, he has 10 years more experience working with it. I think we're all pretty handy, when it comes to using remote support. We know what the tabs do, we can get in there, and we can fix just about anything without having to walk down the hall.
That's true, but in this case, again, and we just happen to have someone here in the building, who actually knows more about Dameware then almost anyone else. He works with it all day long and, in fact, he leads the Dameware product team.
That's correct, please welcome to SolarWinds Lab, Glenn Gray [crowd cheering]
Well, thank you gentlemen. I am thrilled to be here among such admirable geeks.
Admirable, geeks, all in the same sentence, it's amazing. Well, you've come at a right time, because this is a historical moment actually. Because, this is the last time that we're going to see our set. When we get to the end of this episode, we're actually going to tear it down.
Wow, heartbreaking.
Burn it. [Laughing]
Now come on guys, I mean, it's lasted two years, it's made it through two different buildings, you know, you had a lot of good memories here and you haven't been able to break it so far. You know, you just needed to have me here to get a new one.
You? I'm pretty sure it was me.
I don't know.
Okay, so, Glenn, like Rob Johnson, I mean, you're a guru with the product and you've spent a lot of time talking to customers on THWACK and I think actually, what's your THWACK handle?
Glenn Gray.
Yeah, it's really complicated right. [Laughing] Easier for him to say it then me.
Write that one down.
So, most of you probably who are using Dameware are already familiar with Glenn, so, you know, talk to us a little bit about what your users are experiencing, what they're asking about mostly with Dameware.
Yeah, so I mean, like our other products, I think that most customers spend time on THWACK interacting with myself and other product managers, about features and updates to the product that they would like to see. But one of the things that seems to have come up a lot lately is this idea of setting up the central server, when you should do it, when you shouldn't do it, under what circumstances. And Leon said earlier, that, you know, when he had used it in the past, they only had five admins, so they didn't really see the need for something that had a centralized solution, like the current Dameware Central Server solution. And so, you know, it's something that comes up a lot with a lot of different customers and I think a lot of people kind of feel the same way. And today, I think, maybe we can talk about, why you should use it, under what circumstances you should use it.
That's true, and maybe it's just the DBA in me, but, I think even small sets of data, and in this case, users, where configurations are almost identical, they will benefit from shared resources.
Definitely, for example, with licensing.
Right.
Yeah, absolutely, licensing is a really big one. So, you know, before we deployed, before we came out with the Dameware Central Server, licensing was a real big pain point for the owners of DRS and MRC, because you had to actually activate each license from every individual computer that it was installed on. And so you can imagine, if you had a very large environment, this could take hours, maybe days. So, with the Dameware Central Server, licensing is centralized, one activation, regardless of how many computers you've got it installed on. And then also shared host lists is another great resource that's available in Dameware Central Server.
Okay, well then let's do this; you walk us through, end to end, how to set up the central server and then if we have time, maybe you could actually show us a little bit about the internet proxy server and the mobile gateway as well.
I'd love to.
Great, you know, Tom and I, we were talking and I promised to show him, like the best kosher Reuben in the city.
Oh, yes.
So, I thought maybe we'd, and we have to fly out tomorrow, so we've got a very tight time limit for this wonderful, meaty goodness. So, I thought, maybe we'd sneak out, while Glenn was doing his demo.
That okay?
Sounds good.
I mean, we can come back for the wrap up and maybe for the site tear down.
Okay, that's cool. And they're not kidding, because Leon's already got out his phone. All right.
Whoa, no no no, you stay for this.
Oh, I'm staying. This is not for me.
Oh.
Oh, nice. Hey, and there's the cart.
Amazing.
That thing’s just magical isn't it?
So what is it you're going to demo for us?
So today, I'm going to show how to configure the Dameware Central Server. And then we're going to pop in and have a look at how to configure the additional components that come with the Dameware Central Server, which are the Dameware mobile gateway, which allows you to make connections from a mobile device, specifically an iOS or an Android device, to computers inside your firewall. And then we'll talk about hooking up and setting up the Dameware internet proxy, which allows you to make connections to computers that are located outside your firewall.
Cool.
This is awesome, and I've played with this a little bit, but usually, you know, I'm in the lab. And so, I've got a set of VMs, so it's more kind of, one to many and an army of one, so I don't really get to play with this that much. So, especially the gateway is going to be really cool to take a look at.
Great, let's take a look at it. So, what we're looking at right now is the Dameware Server Configuration Wizard, and I'm not going to bother walking through the actual installation process, because it's actually quite simple and basically, what it does is it just shows you a list of the components, which are the Dameware Central Server, the Administration Console, Internet Proxy and Mobile Gateway. And, you install each of those, you can install each of those on separate machines, but the main thing is that when you are installing any one of those, you use the same installer pack, so it's quite simple really. And so, part of the installation package is the administration console, which I'm going to be showing you in just a moment here, so make sure that when you're installing the Central Server, that you choose to install the administration console on the same machine.
Got it.
You can also install it on others machines if you'd like, but for our purposes here, we want to make sure we've got them on the same machine.
And you know, you said I'm not going to bother to show you, but, I mean, really it's exactly the same installer, you're just taking it and running it on different machines and actually selecting different components to install wherever you want to put them.
That's exactly right.
Yeah.
So, before we jump in and start looking at each one of these individual components I'm going to show you this chart that is included, here in the Configuration Wizard, that really show you the recommended deployment scenario.
You just brought this up so that we didn't have to do an animated chart right. [Laughing]
Much easier this way.
No, but it's actually in the product and it was really handy the first time that I ran this version of the admin console and clicked on it, because I was like, oh that's where that thing needs to go, right. I mean, you know you're going to put the Internet Proxy inside your DMZ.
Right.
But, the ideas about where to put those firewalls and the ports that need to be open and the rest of it, it's really helpful to kind of lay all of this out.
Yeah absolutely, so what we're looking at here is that chart and as you can see, the Internet Proxy is going to reside here in a DMZ. Down here, we've got the Mobile Gateway inside the corporate firewall. However, we could place it in a DMZ if we wanted to. It's not bad idea to have it here, because the only people that are really going to connect to the Mobile Gateway Server are technicians, and so we assume that they're going to be able to appropriately use a VPN connection from their mobile device.
Right.
So, we've got it set up over here and then obviously the Dameware Central Server also resides inside. Now the Dameware Central Server and the Administration Console, this is where all of the, you know, the data is going to be stored. Your user accounts and things of that nature. So, important to keep that inside the firewall. But, really, the main thing here that we want to show is that Internet Proxy needs to be, it needs to reside here in this DMZ for your own protection.
Okay.
So, we'll close that chart out. And, so again, like I said, when we run through the installation process and we choose which components we want to install on a specific machine, this is what comes up next. And so, we can go in here and edit some specific details about the Central Server and as you can see here, we can assign the port that we want it to be open, that we want to, you know, receive communication from the other machines. And we can assign, you know, we can assign a specific host name or an IP address from here as well, if we're trying to connect to it from a different spot.
So this is sort of a lot like the SQL Server platform Configuration Utility, so that you're setting the configuration for how the components are talking to each other and it's all in that, all inside of this one dialogue.
Yeah, that's absolutely right. Similar thing here for the Internet Proxy. You can see that what we're going to here is we're going to tell it how to talk back to the Central Server, which ports to use and so on and so forth. Now, another thing that's really interesting about the Internet Proxy, and we're going to show you, just in a little while, what an over the internet connection looks like, that goes through the Internet Proxy. But an important part of that is the Internet Session URL. It's a lot like, some sort of a GoToMeeting session or something like that, where you're going to end up sending out a session URL to the end user, that they're going to click on, which will initiate the session from their end.
Got it.
So, you can specify, at this point here, whatever you want that to be. So, as you can see in the example, they've got it set to your domain or whatever, and so, you can go and change this, and you can leave it alone and accept the default or change it to whatever you want.
And so then, the combination of what you designate is that externally available URL, plus the ports are also going to represent firewall changes that you didn't make inside your environment to make sure that it actually works for incoming.
You got it.
Okay. So, and here we would go ahead and if we wanted to, during the configuration, we would test the connection and make sure it works. This is not set up to do that just exactly in this kind of environment, so we'll...
Because you've got everything running on one machine?
Exactly [laughs]. Not a recommended scenario, by the way. Not a bad scenario for testing inside your firewall, but certainly not what you want to do in a production environment.
Right.
And then the Dameware Mobile Gateway service, okay. So, the Dameware Mobile Gateway service is just a, it's a gateway that allows you to make connections from an iOS or an Android device to Windows computers, inside your firewall. So, this is a great tool for techs that are in an on call rotation, that can't be chained to their house all weekend. So this will allow you to make those kinds of connections from wherever you're at, as long as you can get like a 3G signal or something like that.
And then where do they get the mobile client.
The mobile client's available in the app stores.
Okay.
So, you can get it at the Google Play store and also in the iTunes app store as well.
All right, so then after they get this set up, they're going to need to go download the app and then it'll walk them through the connection, based on these settings.
You got it, yeah, the Dameware mobile app, we're not going to show what that looks like today, but it's a, we actually have that on the Dameware remote support product overview videos, so if you want to have a look at that, I encourage you to do that. It's actually really simple; the screen doesn't look a whole lot different than this really.
Let's actually throw a link into that into the show notes and then for the YouTube version, we'll have a link to that video also.
Excellent. So there you have it, I mean, really, it's as simple as that. So, that's what it would look like, sort of, in an employed environment, so now let me just show you what the Administration Console looks like, because this is where the rubber hits the road, sort of speak. So, the Administration Console, for those of you who have used the Dameware Mobile Gateway in past versions, you'll recognize this format. So, what all can you do from the Administration Console? Well, I'm glad I asked myself that. [Laughing] The main things that we heard from our user base about Dameware, or the main complaints that we heard were licensing and activation. And like I mentioned earlier, prior to version 11 of Dameware, the management of licenses was a little bit onerous, especially if you had a really large environment, where you may have thousands of technicians that are running Dameware. Where you literally had to go from computer to computer, activating Dameware there. And then you can imagine, in a large environment like that, you've got a lot of turnover sometimes and you're constantly having to reset and recycle some of these licenses as well. And so...
But also, if you have a small environment, maybe with a remote location, you've got somebody at a remote office, the remote IT out there, then they're always, you know, you're kind of doing the key shuffle over email, but instead if you're using a Central Server, then they just connect to it from wherever they are and they pick up license and go.
Absolutely, Absolutely.
It almost, just becomes a service to them and they don't have to worry about it.
That's exactly right. So this allows you to activate all of your Dameware licenses, so what we found over time is that a lot of our Dameware customers own both DRS licenses, Dameware Remote Support, and Mini Remote Control.
That's true.
And a lot of times, they'll own several licenses of each, so you may own 20 seats of one license, with 20 seats of DRS and another license of MRC, with 20 seats of that. This allows you to manage all of those right here and then assign those licenses to specific users, depending on what their needs are, in terms of supporting end users. So, let me just show you what that looks like really quickly. So, we've got a user set up here. This is the standard admin account that gets set up, so you can go in and change those things as well, but here's a DRS user. If we wanted to, we could go in and edit this. And let's say, for example, that this guy doesn't need access to over the internet connections through the Internet Proxy. We want this guy supporting people inside the network. So, if we wanted to do that, we would want to assign him a Mini Remote Control license only. So we could do that there and now the additional DRS, or Dameware Remote Support functionality is lock out for him.
And it'll automatically use the correct license and not deduct a DRS license, when all they need is the Mini Remote Control.
That's exactly right, and the great thing about this, is that, you know again, going back to that scenario, where you've got a company that maybe has a lot of turnover. This is something that can be managed sort of dynamically. In other words, if you've used up your licenses, all you have to do is unassign one from one user, and then reassign it to another user, rather than having to call in support and have them unlock a license for you.
That's great.
So, this is again, this is where you would go in and just either set up a user or edit an existing user. You can also make them an administrator. This would give them access to this Administration Console that we're looking at right now. So that is that. So, another big piece is, so, you know, going back to that large environment, and I don't want to harp too much on large environments, because a lot of our Dameware customers tend to have smaller environments. But, for those large environments, and even some of the smaller ones, we've got this new Active Directory Import function here. So, let's see...
Well, or any environment where you're using AD authentication.
Yeah, exactly, so let's say that you've got a situation where you're a first time Dameware user or maybe you're just switching over to V 11 in the Central Server Environment and you've got hundreds, maybe a couple of thousands of Dameware technicians. Well, rather than going in and creating all of these accounts manually, you can simply just import them from your active directory and then you can in and assign new passwords or whatever you like here. We're not connected to an AD instance here, so there's nothing showing up, but...
Yeah, it'll give you the list, you select from the list.
You got it.
You can use groups to sort.
Absolutely, if you've got like a tech group or something like that, you can just pull those guys all down and then this will populate for you. So it makes it a lot easier to manage your licenses from that first time, when you're first pulling all the stuff down. So, from here, we can also set up what's called a Global Host List. And, so this is something that we got a lot of requests about too. So, you know, you have a situation, where you've got several technicians that are connecting to, maybe hundreds or even thousands of different machines. And, you know, prior to version 11, there was no way to really affectively share a single host list. You could export a host list from one DRS client and import it into another one, but it didn't account for any changes that were made to that. So, from here you can actually go in and create one single, or actually multiple instances of a Global Host List. Add as many computers as you want to it, you know, name it whatever you want. And then, in the MRC console, every user will see a list of different Global Host Lists. So, anything that you've got set up here will automatically show up, as long as they are connecting, not doing a direct connect, but connecting through the Central Server. And I'm going to show you what that looks like in just a moment as well.
Well actually, one of the great points about this is that, we're using this now with the geek team, where one of us will set up a VM, for example, where we're going to show something or we're running a beta or something else. And instead of, you know, you email off the connection information and all of the details that they need. Nah, just throw it into the Central Host List.
Right.
And then when you connect to the Central Server, it's there and it really makes it easy to hand off connections to those desktops.
Yeah, absolutely, it is really a very handy tool. And so, you know, we talked a little bit about the configuration piece of the Central Server and the additional components. There are also some additional settings here for both your Internet Proxy and your Dameware Mobile Gateway Server. So we won't get too heavy into these, but just know that you can come in here and also make some additional changes as well. So, why don't we have a look at what the MRC Console looks like? And so, for those of you who have used Dameware in the past, this is obviously very familiar to you. Nothing has really changed in terms of the format. I'm going to go ahead and just close this down and launch it again, so you can see now, that this is the Central Server deployment version of it and not the stand-alone. You can see that we actually have to make a connection to the Central Server. So let's see if I can find it here. So here's Mini Remote Control, we'll just go ahead and launch that. And as you can see, it's actually prompting you to log in to the Central Server. And, if you give it some bad creds or something like that, it'll just boot you out. But, the key here is that now all of your connections are managed through the Central Server. So, in the past, what we've done for licensing purposes is we've allowed one individual license of one individual seat of Dameware to reside on three different machines.
Right.
So, for obvious reasons, right. I mean, I've got, let's say I'm a technician and I've got two or three different machines that I'm supporting end users from. I need to make sure that I can use my license on each one of those machines. Now, we don't limit that installation to just three machines.
It's just wherever you are.
Exactly, you can install it on a gazillion machines if you want to. You have to have these login credentials to get in, however. And this is how we enforce licensing on it now. So, you'd simply put in your username and password, hit Connect and it's going to open up the very familiar console that you've all seen before.
And the other thing that I like about this, is it makes it really easy to manage, especially, you know you mentioned, kind of, teams with a lot of transient membership, right.
Right.
Is that when you need to remove access for a user, it's a piece of cake, you go disable them or remove them from the Central Admin Server and they're not going to be able to login.
Absolutely, yeah. If you've got a large environment like that and you need to just block somebody out, someone who walked out or something along those lines, you can absolutely do that and just kill their access immediately. So, as you can tell, this really is not very different from what you've seen in the past, but you may notice that there is this extra button up here and this is called the Internet Session. And this is the new feature in version 11 that allows us to make connections to computers located outside the firewall via the Internet Proxy in a secure manor. So, let's just pick one of these machines here and I'll show you what this looks like. So, we're going to go ahead and choose Internet Session, and you'll see the first thing that pops up here is, it's prompting you for a session name. So, this is an opportunity for you to go in and actually create a specific session name for login purposes. So you can come back over later on and have a look at it and say, oh I connected to this machine.
You mean I'm not going to have to look at hundreds of computer generated session names and try to guess which one that actually was.
You could and, you know, the nice thing is, is that, you know, for the computer generated ones, it's time stamped with the date and time and it also has the user here. Obviously, this is a generic one, but if I had my name on here, for example, it would show up as Glenn.
So you just click go and you're set. But if you wanted to go and track it later, it's pretty easy; you just give it a name.
Absolutely. So, when you create this session, what'll happen here is you'll see this dialog box that pops up, and this is prompting you to send out the session details to the end user. So remember I said earlier, when we were looking at the Configuration Wizard for the Dameware Internet Proxy, that this is a lot like a go to meeting session, in that the end user has to accept your connections. At this point, we can't make connections to unattended machines. That's something that we're working on, so stay tuned and hopefully we'll see that shortly.
Yeah but, a little bit complicated to have an unattended machine on the internet that just magically knows what to do in a secure manner.
Absolutely, no doubt about it. And so, we wanted to make sure that we did that right, before we just dumped it out onto the market. So, right now, what you see is this dialog box again, and what we can do here, is I can go ahead and click on email details if I want to and what it'll do, is it'll kick off my default email client and it will drop this URL into it, with a couple of really brief instructions for the end user. Click on the link, you know, allow it to connect and it's really really simple. So, it's as simple as that. If you don't have a default email client, you can simply copy this out to the clipboard, send it in a chat or send it in a, you know, via Gmail or something along those lines.
For a non-technical user, it looks like a GoToMeeting or anything else; it's pretty easy. Dropbox, same sort of thing.
Absolutely, they receive an email, it's got a URL in it, they click on the URL, something pops up and says, this person wants to connect to your machine, do you want to let them do it, they click on yes and boom you're in.
That's great. So, otherwise, it's a lot like any other MRC connection that you would make. You have a lot of the same functionality that you would have in just making connections via the regular MRC driver inside your firewall. So, that is basically it.
That's really handy, and especially because it does give you a visual way of knowing whether they have connected or not.
Right.
Well yeah, I'm connected. No, you're not. [Laughing] No no no no. I'm connected.
I really am [laughing].
No, no you're really not. Oh, I need to click on this link. Yes, please click on that link. Okay, now you're connected.
Exactly.
Step one of debugging; get connected.
Thank you Glenn, that was very very helpful. But, I wondered if there's one more thing you could show us. And that's the set up and the new integration with Web Help Desk.
Yeah, I mean, that is really cool and I don't know if you've played with it yet, but, I mean, you're used to with DRS, you throw an IP address, there the same, or, as we just saw a minute ago, use the Common Host File, right, with Central Server. But, being able to be looking at help desk ticket and with one click, jump out and connect to it, is really cool, but there's a little set up that you need to do that makes that actually work.
Or like the engineer's tool set integration with NPM.
Yeah, there's a configuration for that.
Yeah or the debugging tools in SAM.
Yes.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, I'm glad you guys asked about this. The Web Help Desk Dameware integration piece was something that was heavily requested by our customer base. And I think they've done a really good job of putting this together. So let me just show you what this looks like.
Okay.
So, here we are, we're logged into a Web Help Desk Console that we've got set up in a demo environment here. So, the first thing I want to show is just how easy it is to actually perform the integration between the two. We've made this really simple.
And do I need to upgrade my Web Help Desk to do this?
Yeah, you'll have to be on the latest version of Web Help Desk.
Okay. And the latest version of Dameware. That's 12.2 for Web Help Desk. 11.1 for Dameware.
Okay awesome.
So, if you go over to the set up tab, and go over here into the assets section, under options, you'll see a really easy radio button to click on here, to enable the Dameware and Web Help Desk integration. So again, remember, you have to have the Dameware client installed on the local machine here, but if you just click this button and enable this, it's as simple as that. Now we're linked up.
Is this visible, even if I don't have Dameware installed or it knows Dameware is there and it presents that checkbox.
It is visible, if Dameware is not installed, but it won't give you the option to check it.
Okay, that's great, so they gray it out, so you'll know you need to verify your install for the agent.
You got it. All right.
Not agent, client.
Yes.
No agents. [Laughing]
All right, so let's roll back over here to tickets and I'll show you exactly what you can do with this. So, let's pick a machine here, we'll go to this guy. And so, now we've entered the ticket details, I'm going to go over to the Asset tab and now you can see, we've actually got a little Dameware logoed button over here.
Look at that.
Yeah, and so, all you have to do, give this a click, it's going to launch the Dameware MRC console and jump right in. So now, we're connected to the remote machine, via the Dameware console and Web Help Desk integration and I'm just going to pull this down and show you, that it shows you here that you're running in Web Help Desk Integration mode. And so, what does that mean for us? Well, you know, this gives us all the same functionality that we would have through a normal Dameware connection. So, I can initiate a chat window. And kick off a chat with the end user. Hello. I can also take one click screenshots and do all the other things that I can normally do. What's great here is, when I disconnect, it automatically prompts me to save all the session details from the MRC connection to the Web Help Desk ticket. So, for example, had I taken a screenshot, I could attach the screenshot.
Or was I able to resolve the issue.
Exactly, so this lets you fill in ticket details right here on the spot and as I said, it takes all of the sort of metadata that's associated with the connection, so, for example, it shows me the client that I've connected to. It shows the start time, the end time, the basic duration and whether or not this session was terminated by me or whether there was some sort of error or something along those lines.
Right.
But it also captures all of the screenshots and the chat information as well. And, so then, I can go ahead and save this and it pops right into the ticket details in Web Help Desk. This is really nice, so one of the things that we've asked for a lot with Dameware and one of the things that we're actually working on right now is session logging information. With the Central Server componentry, we actually now have a springboard to incorporate those features. In the meantime, this is a really good proxy for that. So, if you've got both of these, you can actually store session details in Web Help Desk by using Dameware and launching it directly from Web Help Desk tickets.
How many times is it going to take, four or five visits to resolve something. Hopefully it doesn't.
But it might.
So, being able to save state for that session is really important.
Exactly.
Okay, so I do, so one question that I'm sure that they're going to have, which is about security and access context here. Can anyone who logs into Web Help Desk, essentially now have the ability to get remote access to any server in the system that happens to have a ticket?
That's a good question. So, the answer to that is no. It really depends on what kind of permissions you have set up on the Dameware side of the house. So, for example, if you're using a Dameware Central Server and you do not have a user account, but let's just say that you've got it installed on this machine. It's going to prompt you for a set of credentials to login to Dameware. If you can't provide those, it's not going to allow you to make the connection via Dameware.
Okay, awesome.
All right, so now we can save the details of this ticket. And you can see that it's been uploaded to Web Help Desk. We'll shut that down. And now we can go over to the Ticket Details and if we scroll down here.
Ah, there it is.
Yeah, absolutely. So you can see that basically what this does is it stores the chat in an RTF file format and it'll store any screenshots in PNG format. You can also launch, directly from asset information. The motion is exactly the same, so if I went over here under Assets and found that same computer, I could also launch directly from there. But, it looks exactly the same. The only thing that would be different here, is if I launched this irrespective of a ticket or not connected to a specific ticket, what you'll see and when we're closing down, is that it allows us to create a ticket from that spot right there.
Okay, oh that's even better.
Yeah.
Yeah, ‘cause I've never seen this machine before, I don't have a ticket open, somethings broken, they're calling me on the phone.
Right.
So you're going to skip the whole, did you open a ticket piece. You can immediately connect, then generate the ticket right there.
You got it.
That's great. How long were you guys working on this?
This took about three or four months for us to put together.
That's great.
Hey, the cart's gone.
And we got Tom and Leon back.
Yeah, but really, that was a really great demo. Thanks for walking us through that. You know, it's really funny, anytime we have integration based on Swis, it's always really smooth. So, I'm definitely going to have to check that out and really the question there, for me anyway, is the training environment for customers is actually hybrid cloud, not in Amazon. So then the question is, can I run it in hybrid cloud.
Yeah, absolutely.
Okay, yeah, being able to use the common host list would be really handy.
For sure.
Great.
You know, I'm looking around this set and I'm thinking to myself, I'm really going to miss this old set. I mean, is the new one anywhere near as amazing as this?
It's not exactly SportsCenter, but we're pretty sure that they're going to like it.
And how can the viewers be sure not to miss the premier with the new set?
Oh, that's easy. Just go to lab.solarwinds.com.
That's right. Well Glenn, thanks again for coming by today. And of course, Glenn’s going to be live on chat. If you're live with us and you've been to lab.solarwinds.com, so you knew about the live premier. And of course, he's always available in the Dameware forums on THWACK as well.
Well I really enjoyed it, thanks for having me gentlemen.
Yeah, you bet. Thanks for being here. Tom, you want to take us out?
Sure. I'm Thomas LaRock.
I'm Leon Adato.
I'm Lawrence Garvin.
Oh, and I'm Glenn Gray.
And I'm Patrick Hubbard. And thanks for watching Solar Winds Lab. SolarWinds Lab Episode 21: Configuring Dameware Central Server and Internet Proxy for 2-Way Remote Support
May 11, 2018 |
Video
We’re wrapping up 2014 with a huge, heavily requested show topic: managing Dameware® across the enterprise! The Geeks will detail how to get three great new extra features up and running in Dameware. Covering topics from centralizing your licensing, to synchronizing host lists, to using the Internet Proxy, the Mobile Gateway Server and more. Who doesn't like two-way access from the web? (Especially on the weekends!)
Join Patrick Hubbard, Lawrence Garvin, Thomas LaRock, and Leon Adato, along with Dameware Product Marketing Manager Glenn Gray, who knows a thing or three about Dameware. Glenn will do a five-minute how-to on activating the Dameware Web Help Desk® integration.
Episode Transcript
Hi, I'm Thomas LaRock.
I'm Leon Adato.
I'm Patrick Hubbard.
And I'm Lawrence Garvin and welcome to SolarWinds Lab with the quatro geeks. We have yet another episode today that comes directly from topics suggestions for the show.
That's right, ripped from the pages of breaking THWACK community news.
And it's not law and order, special admins unit, if that's what you're going with.
Kind of.
Nope, today's show is all about Dameware, and specifically, how to set up the Central Server, Mobile Proxy and Internet Gateway.
That's right, an entire how to episode on advanced use of Dameware.
That's cool and, so how did our viewers provide this feedback.
Well, they provided lots and lots of comments at lab.solarwinds.com and of course, for those of you who are watching live, you see this great big chat box over here. We're all live chatting with you during the show and for those of you who aren't, it's an opportunity to sign up for reminders, so things like our lab 16 service pack one episode, which sort of appeared out of nowhere. Everyone that attended that, got to know about it through that sign up notification. So, definitely visit our site and keep your feedback coming, because you are really now driving every single one of these episodes.
So, I've been using Dameware for a really long time. Actually, before it became part of the SolarWinds suite, but when I was using it, we only had five admins, so we didn't use the DCS.
Yeah, so again, you know, we're going to de-jargonify here, so D-C-S, is Dameware Central Server.
DCS, that will help, because we're probably going to that about 20 times in this show.
At least.
Or 30.
And that reminds me, so I'm guessing, we didn't rename the Dameware NT utilities, to Dameware remote support, just because then the abbreviation would have been DNTU.
Correct.
Correct, we did this in honor of NT's 80th birthday.
Hey, NT pretty much saved Microsoft as we know it.
Okay.
All right.
Okay, so on our last episode, folks saw on Log and Event manager, LEM, we admitted that, you know, we're pretty decent at administering it, setting up filters and rules and that kind of thing. But when it comes down to it, we were not nearly as gururific, as Rob Johnson was, right.
So that's true, but I mean, he has 10 years more experience working with it. I think we're all pretty handy, when it comes to using remote support. We know what the tabs do, we can get in there, and we can fix just about anything without having to walk down the hall.
That's true, but in this case, again, and we just happen to have someone here in the building, who actually knows more about Dameware then almost anyone else. He works with it all day long and, in fact, he leads the Dameware product team.
That's correct, please welcome to SolarWinds Lab, Glenn Gray [crowd cheering]
Well, thank you gentlemen. I am thrilled to be here among such admirable geeks.
Admirable, geeks, all in the same sentence, it's amazing. Well, you've come at a right time, because this is a historical moment actually. Because, this is the last time that we're going to see our set. When we get to the end of this episode, we're actually going to tear it down.
Wow, heartbreaking.
Burn it. [Laughing]
Now come on guys, I mean, it's lasted two years, it's made it through two different buildings, you know, you had a lot of good memories here and you haven't been able to break it so far. You know, you just needed to have me here to get a new one.
You? I'm pretty sure it was me.
I don't know.
Okay, so, Glenn, like Rob Johnson, I mean, you're a guru with the product and you've spent a lot of time talking to customers on THWACK and I think actually, what's your THWACK handle?
Glenn Gray.
Yeah, it's really complicated right. [Laughing] Easier for him to say it then me.
Write that one down.
So, most of you probably who are using Dameware are already familiar with Glenn, so, you know, talk to us a little bit about what your users are experiencing, what they're asking about mostly with Dameware.
Yeah, so I mean, like our other products, I think that most customers spend time on THWACK interacting with myself and other product managers, about features and updates to the product that they would like to see. But one of the things that seems to have come up a lot lately is this idea of setting up the central server, when you should do it, when you shouldn't do it, under what circumstances. And Leon said earlier, that, you know, when he had used it in the past, they only had five admins, so they didn't really see the need for something that had a centralized solution, like the current Dameware Central Server solution. And so, you know, it's something that comes up a lot with a lot of different customers and I think a lot of people kind of feel the same way. And today, I think, maybe we can talk about, why you should use it, under what circumstances you should use it.
That's true, and maybe it's just the DBA in me, but, I think even small sets of data, and in this case, users, where configurations are almost identical, they will benefit from shared resources.
Definitely, for example, with licensing.
Right.
Yeah, absolutely, licensing is a really big one. So, you know, before we deployed, before we came out with the Dameware Central Server, licensing was a real big pain point for the owners of DRS and MRC, because you had to actually activate each license from every individual computer that it was installed on. And so you can imagine, if you had a very large environment, this could take hours, maybe days. So, with the Dameware Central Server, licensing is centralized, one activation, regardless of how many computers you've got it installed on. And then also shared host lists is another great resource that's available in Dameware Central Server.
Okay, well then let's do this; you walk us through, end to end, how to set up the central server and then if we have time, maybe you could actually show us a little bit about the internet proxy server and the mobile gateway as well.
I'd love to.
Great, you know, Tom and I, we were talking and I promised to show him, like the best kosher Reuben in the city.
Oh, yes.
So, I thought maybe we'd, and we have to fly out tomorrow, so we've got a very tight time limit for this wonderful, meaty goodness. So, I thought, maybe we'd sneak out, while Glenn was doing his demo.
That okay?
Sounds good.
I mean, we can come back for the wrap up and maybe for the site tear down.
Okay, that's cool. And they're not kidding, because Leon's already got out his phone. All right.
Whoa, no no no, you stay for this.
Oh, I'm staying. This is not for me.
Oh.
Oh, nice. Hey, and there's the cart.
Amazing.
That thing’s just magical isn't it?
So what is it you're going to demo for us?
So today, I'm going to show how to configure the Dameware Central Server. And then we're going to pop in and have a look at how to configure the additional components that come with the Dameware Central Server, which are the Dameware mobile gateway, which allows you to make connections from a mobile device, specifically an iOS or an Android device, to computers inside your firewall. And then we'll talk about hooking up and setting up the Dameware internet proxy, which allows you to make connections to computers that are located outside your firewall.
Cool.
This is awesome, and I've played with this a little bit, but usually, you know, I'm in the lab. And so, I've got a set of VMs, so it's more kind of, one to many and an army of one, so I don't really get to play with this that much. So, especially the gateway is going to be really cool to take a look at.
Great, let's take a look at it. So, what we're looking at right now is the Dameware Server Configuration Wizard, and I'm not going to bother walking through the actual installation process, because it's actually quite simple and basically, what it does is it just shows you a list of the components, which are the Dameware Central Server, the Administration Console, Internet Proxy and Mobile Gateway. And, you install each of those, you can install each of those on separate machines, but the main thing is that when you are installing any one of those, you use the same installer pack, so it's quite simple really. And so, part of the installation package is the administration console, which I'm going to be showing you in just a moment here, so make sure that when you're installing the Central Server, that you choose to install the administration console on the same machine.
Got it.
You can also install it on others machines if you'd like, but for our purposes here, we want to make sure we've got them on the same machine.
And you know, you said I'm not going to bother to show you, but, I mean, really it's exactly the same installer, you're just taking it and running it on different machines and actually selecting different components to install wherever you want to put them.
That's exactly right.
Yeah.
So, before we jump in and start looking at each one of these individual components I'm going to show you this chart that is included, here in the Configuration Wizard, that really show you the recommended deployment scenario.
You just brought this up so that we didn't have to do an animated chart right. [Laughing]
Much easier this way.
No, but it's actually in the product and it was really handy the first time that I ran this version of the admin console and clicked on it, because I was like, oh that's where that thing needs to go, right. I mean, you know you're going to put the Internet Proxy inside your DMZ.
Right.
But, the ideas about where to put those firewalls and the ports that need to be open and the rest of it, it's really helpful to kind of lay all of this out.
Yeah absolutely, so what we're looking at here is that chart and as you can see, the Internet Proxy is going to reside here in a DMZ. Down here, we've got the Mobile Gateway inside the corporate firewall. However, we could place it in a DMZ if we wanted to. It's not bad idea to have it here, because the only people that are really going to connect to the Mobile Gateway Server are technicians, and so we assume that they're going to be able to appropriately use a VPN connection from their mobile device.
Right.
So, we've got it set up over here and then obviously the Dameware Central Server also resides inside. Now the Dameware Central Server and the Administration Console, this is where all of the, you know, the data is going to be stored. Your user accounts and things of that nature. So, important to keep that inside the firewall. But, really, the main thing here that we want to show is that Internet Proxy needs to be, it needs to reside here in this DMZ for your own protection.
Okay.
So, we'll close that chart out. And, so again, like I said, when we run through the installation process and we choose which components we want to install on a specific machine, this is what comes up next. And so, we can go in here and edit some specific details about the Central Server and as you can see here, we can assign the port that we want it to be open, that we want to, you know, receive communication from the other machines. And we can assign, you know, we can assign a specific host name or an IP address from here as well, if we're trying to connect to it from a different spot.
So this is sort of a lot like the SQL Server platform Configuration Utility, so that you're setting the configuration for how the components are talking to each other and it's all in that, all inside of this one dialogue.
Yeah, that's absolutely right. Similar thing here for the Internet Proxy. You can see that what we're going to here is we're going to tell it how to talk back to the Central Server, which ports to use and so on and so forth. Now, another thing that's really interesting about the Internet Proxy, and we're going to show you, just in a little while, what an over the internet connection looks like, that goes through the Internet Proxy. But an important part of that is the Internet Session URL. It's a lot like, some sort of a GoToMeeting session or something like that, where you're going to end up sending out a session URL to the end user, that they're going to click on, which will initiate the session from their end.
Got it.
So, you can specify, at this point here, whatever you want that to be. So, as you can see in the example, they've got it set to your domain or whatever, and so, you can go and change this, and you can leave it alone and accept the default or change it to whatever you want.
And so then, the combination of what you designate is that externally available URL, plus the ports are also going to represent firewall changes that you didn't make inside your environment to make sure that it actually works for incoming.
You got it.
Okay. So, and here we would go ahead and if we wanted to, during the configuration, we would test the connection and make sure it works. This is not set up to do that just exactly in this kind of environment, so we'll...
Because you've got everything running on one machine?
Exactly [laughs]. Not a recommended scenario, by the way. Not a bad scenario for testing inside your firewall, but certainly not what you want to do in a production environment.
Right.
And then the Dameware Mobile Gateway service, okay. So, the Dameware Mobile Gateway service is just a, it's a gateway that allows you to make connections from an iOS or an Android device to Windows computers, inside your firewall. So, this is a great tool for techs that are in an on call rotation, that can't be chained to their house all weekend. So this will allow you to make those kinds of connections from wherever you're at, as long as you can get like a 3G signal or something like that.
And then where do they get the mobile client.
The mobile client's available in the app stores.
Okay.
So, you can get it at the Google Play store and also in the iTunes app store as well.
All right, so then after they get this set up, they're going to need to go download the app and then it'll walk them through the connection, based on these settings.
You got it, yeah, the Dameware mobile app, we're not going to show what that looks like today, but it's a, we actually have that on the Dameware remote support product overview videos, so if you want to have a look at that, I encourage you to do that. It's actually really simple; the screen doesn't look a whole lot different than this really.
Let's actually throw a link into that into the show notes and then for the YouTube version, we'll have a link to that video also.
Excellent. So there you have it, I mean, really, it's as simple as that. So, that's what it would look like, sort of, in an employed environment, so now let me just show you what the Administration Console looks like, because this is where the rubber hits the road, sort of speak. So, the Administration Console, for those of you who have used the Dameware Mobile Gateway in past versions, you'll recognize this format. So, what all can you do from the Administration Console? Well, I'm glad I asked myself that. [Laughing] The main things that we heard from our user base about Dameware, or the main complaints that we heard were licensing and activation. And like I mentioned earlier, prior to version 11 of Dameware, the management of licenses was a little bit onerous, especially if you had a really large environment, where you may have thousands of technicians that are running Dameware. Where you literally had to go from computer to computer, activating Dameware there. And then you can imagine, in a large environment like that, you've got a lot of turnover sometimes and you're constantly having to reset and recycle some of these licenses as well. And so...
But also, if you have a small environment, maybe with a remote location, you've got somebody at a remote office, the remote IT out there, then they're always, you know, you're kind of doing the key shuffle over email, but instead if you're using a Central Server, then they just connect to it from wherever they are and they pick up license and go.
Absolutely, Absolutely.
It almost, just becomes a service to them and they don't have to worry about it.
That's exactly right. So this allows you to activate all of your Dameware licenses, so what we found over time is that a lot of our Dameware customers own both DRS licenses, Dameware Remote Support, and Mini Remote Control.
That's true.
And a lot of times, they'll own several licenses of each, so you may own 20 seats of one license, with 20 seats of DRS and another license of MRC, with 20 seats of that. This allows you to manage all of those right here and then assign those licenses to specific users, depending on what their needs are, in terms of supporting end users. So, let me just show you what that looks like really quickly. So, we've got a user set up here. This is the standard admin account that gets set up, so you can go in and change those things as well, but here's a DRS user. If we wanted to, we could go in and edit this. And let's say, for example, that this guy doesn't need access to over the internet connections through the Internet Proxy. We want this guy supporting people inside the network. So, if we wanted to do that, we would want to assign him a Mini Remote Control license only. So we could do that there and now the additional DRS, or Dameware Remote Support functionality is lock out for him.
And it'll automatically use the correct license and not deduct a DRS license, when all they need is the Mini Remote Control.
That's exactly right, and the great thing about this, is that, you know again, going back to that scenario, where you've got a company that maybe has a lot of turnover. This is something that can be managed sort of dynamically. In other words, if you've used up your licenses, all you have to do is unassign one from one user, and then reassign it to another user, rather than having to call in support and have them unlock a license for you.
That's great.
So, this is again, this is where you would go in and just either set up a user or edit an existing user. You can also make them an administrator. This would give them access to this Administration Console that we're looking at right now. So that is that. So, another big piece is, so, you know, going back to that large environment, and I don't want to harp too much on large environments, because a lot of our Dameware customers tend to have smaller environments. But, for those large environments, and even some of the smaller ones, we've got this new Active Directory Import function here. So, let's see...
Well, or any environment where you're using AD authentication.
Yeah, exactly, so let's say that you've got a situation where you're a first time Dameware user or maybe you're just switching over to V 11 in the Central Server Environment and you've got hundreds, maybe a couple of thousands of Dameware technicians. Well, rather than going in and creating all of these accounts manually, you can simply just import them from your active directory and then you can in and assign new passwords or whatever you like here. We're not connected to an AD instance here, so there's nothing showing up, but...
Yeah, it'll give you the list, you select from the list.
You got it.
You can use groups to sort.
Absolutely, if you've got like a tech group or something like that, you can just pull those guys all down and then this will populate for you. So it makes it a lot easier to manage your licenses from that first time, when you're first pulling all the stuff down. So, from here, we can also set up what's called a Global Host List. And, so this is something that we got a lot of requests about too. So, you know, you have a situation, where you've got several technicians that are connecting to, maybe hundreds or even thousands of different machines. And, you know, prior to version 11, there was no way to really affectively share a single host list. You could export a host list from one DRS client and import it into another one, but it didn't account for any changes that were made to that. So, from here you can actually go in and create one single, or actually multiple instances of a Global Host List. Add as many computers as you want to it, you know, name it whatever you want. And then, in the MRC console, every user will see a list of different Global Host Lists. So, anything that you've got set up here will automatically show up, as long as they are connecting, not doing a direct connect, but connecting through the Central Server. And I'm going to show you what that looks like in just a moment as well.
Well actually, one of the great points about this is that, we're using this now with the geek team, where one of us will set up a VM, for example, where we're going to show something or we're running a beta or something else. And instead of, you know, you email off the connection information and all of the details that they need. Nah, just throw it into the Central Host List.
Right.
And then when you connect to the Central Server, it's there and it really makes it easy to hand off connections to those desktops.
Yeah, absolutely, it is really a very handy tool. And so, you know, we talked a little bit about the configuration piece of the Central Server and the additional components. There are also some additional settings here for both your Internet Proxy and your Dameware Mobile Gateway Server. So we won't get too heavy into these, but just know that you can come in here and also make some additional changes as well. So, why don't we have a look at what the MRC Console looks like? And so, for those of you who have used Dameware in the past, this is obviously very familiar to you. Nothing has really changed in terms of the format. I'm going to go ahead and just close this down and launch it again, so you can see now, that this is the Central Server deployment version of it and not the stand-alone. You can see that we actually have to make a connection to the Central Server. So let's see if I can find it here. So here's Mini Remote Control, we'll just go ahead and launch that. And as you can see, it's actually prompting you to log in to the Central Server. And, if you give it some bad creds or something like that, it'll just boot you out. But, the key here is that now all of your connections are managed through the Central Server. So, in the past, what we've done for licensing purposes is we've allowed one individual license of one individual seat of Dameware to reside on three different machines.
Right.
So, for obvious reasons, right. I mean, I've got, let's say I'm a technician and I've got two or three different machines that I'm supporting end users from. I need to make sure that I can use my license on each one of those machines. Now, we don't limit that installation to just three machines.
It's just wherever you are.
Exactly, you can install it on a gazillion machines if you want to. You have to have these login credentials to get in, however. And this is how we enforce licensing on it now. So, you'd simply put in your username and password, hit Connect and it's going to open up the very familiar console that you've all seen before.
And the other thing that I like about this, is it makes it really easy to manage, especially, you know you mentioned, kind of, teams with a lot of transient membership, right.
Right.
Is that when you need to remove access for a user, it's a piece of cake, you go disable them or remove them from the Central Admin Server and they're not going to be able to login.
Absolutely, yeah. If you've got a large environment like that and you need to just block somebody out, someone who walked out or something along those lines, you can absolutely do that and just kill their access immediately. So, as you can tell, this really is not very different from what you've seen in the past, but you may notice that there is this extra button up here and this is called the Internet Session. And this is the new feature in version 11 that allows us to make connections to computers located outside the firewall via the Internet Proxy in a secure manor. So, let's just pick one of these machines here and I'll show you what this looks like. So, we're going to go ahead and choose Internet Session, and you'll see the first thing that pops up here is, it's prompting you for a session name. So, this is an opportunity for you to go in and actually create a specific session name for login purposes. So you can come back over later on and have a look at it and say, oh I connected to this machine.
You mean I'm not going to have to look at hundreds of computer generated session names and try to guess which one that actually was.
You could and, you know, the nice thing is, is that, you know, for the computer generated ones, it's time stamped with the date and time and it also has the user here. Obviously, this is a generic one, but if I had my name on here, for example, it would show up as Glenn.
So you just click go and you're set. But if you wanted to go and track it later, it's pretty easy; you just give it a name.
Absolutely. So, when you create this session, what'll happen here is you'll see this dialog box that pops up, and this is prompting you to send out the session details to the end user. So remember I said earlier, when we were looking at the Configuration Wizard for the Dameware Internet Proxy, that this is a lot like a go to meeting session, in that the end user has to accept your connections. At this point, we can't make connections to unattended machines. That's something that we're working on, so stay tuned and hopefully we'll see that shortly.
Yeah but, a little bit complicated to have an unattended machine on the internet that just magically knows what to do in a secure manner.
Absolutely, no doubt about it. And so, we wanted to make sure that we did that right, before we just dumped it out onto the market. So, right now, what you see is this dialog box again, and what we can do here, is I can go ahead and click on email details if I want to and what it'll do, is it'll kick off my default email client and it will drop this URL into it, with a couple of really brief instructions for the end user. Click on the link, you know, allow it to connect and it's really really simple. So, it's as simple as that. If you don't have a default email client, you can simply copy this out to the clipboard, send it in a chat or send it in a, you know, via Gmail or something along those lines.
For a non-technical user, it looks like a GoToMeeting or anything else; it's pretty easy. Dropbox, same sort of thing.
Absolutely, they receive an email, it's got a URL in it, they click on the URL, something pops up and says, this person wants to connect to your machine, do you want to let them do it, they click on yes and boom you're in.
That's great. So, otherwise, it's a lot like any other MRC connection that you would make. You have a lot of the same functionality that you would have in just making connections via the regular MRC driver inside your firewall. So, that is basically it.
That's really handy, and especially because it does give you a visual way of knowing whether they have connected or not.
Right.
Well yeah, I'm connected. No, you're not. [Laughing] No no no no. I'm connected.
I really am [laughing].
No, no you're really not. Oh, I need to click on this link. Yes, please click on that link. Okay, now you're connected.
Exactly.
Step one of debugging; get connected.
Thank you Glenn, that was very very helpful. But, I wondered if there's one more thing you could show us. And that's the set up and the new integration with Web Help Desk.
Yeah, I mean, that is really cool and I don't know if you've played with it yet, but, I mean, you're used to with DRS, you throw an IP address, there the same, or, as we just saw a minute ago, use the Common Host File, right, with Central Server. But, being able to be looking at help desk ticket and with one click, jump out and connect to it, is really cool, but there's a little set up that you need to do that makes that actually work.
Or like the engineer's tool set integration with NPM.
Yeah, there's a configuration for that.
Yeah or the debugging tools in SAM.
Yes.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, I'm glad you guys asked about this. The Web Help Desk Dameware integration piece was something that was heavily requested by our customer base. And I think they've done a really good job of putting this together. So let me just show you what this looks like.
Okay.
So, here we are, we're logged into a Web Help Desk Console that we've got set up in a demo environment here. So, the first thing I want to show is just how easy it is to actually perform the integration between the two. We've made this really simple.
And do I need to upgrade my Web Help Desk to do this?
Yeah, you'll have to be on the latest version of Web Help Desk.
Okay. And the latest version of Dameware. That's 12.2 for Web Help Desk. 11.1 for Dameware.
Okay awesome.
So, if you go over to the set up tab, and go over here into the assets section, under options, you'll see a really easy radio button to click on here, to enable the Dameware and Web Help Desk integration. So again, remember, you have to have the Dameware client installed on the local machine here, but if you just click this button and enable this, it's as simple as that. Now we're linked up.
Is this visible, even if I don't have Dameware installed or it knows Dameware is there and it presents that checkbox.
It is visible, if Dameware is not installed, but it won't give you the option to check it.
Okay, that's great, so they gray it out, so you'll know you need to verify your install for the agent.
You got it. All right.
Not agent, client.
Yes.
No agents. [Laughing]
All right, so let's roll back over here to tickets and I'll show you exactly what you can do with this. So, let's pick a machine here, we'll go to this guy. And so, now we've entered the ticket details, I'm going to go over to the Asset tab and now you can see, we've actually got a little Dameware logoed button over here.
Look at that.
Yeah, and so, all you have to do, give this a click, it's going to launch the Dameware MRC console and jump right in. So now, we're connected to the remote machine, via the Dameware console and Web Help Desk integration and I'm just going to pull this down and show you, that it shows you here that you're running in Web Help Desk Integration mode. And so, what does that mean for us? Well, you know, this gives us all the same functionality that we would have through a normal Dameware connection. So, I can initiate a chat window. And kick off a chat with the end user. Hello. I can also take one click screenshots and do all the other things that I can normally do. What's great here is, when I disconnect, it automatically prompts me to save all the session details from the MRC connection to the Web Help Desk ticket. So, for example, had I taken a screenshot, I could attach the screenshot.
Or was I able to resolve the issue.
Exactly, so this lets you fill in ticket details right here on the spot and as I said, it takes all of the sort of metadata that's associated with the connection, so, for example, it shows me the client that I've connected to. It shows the start time, the end time, the basic duration and whether or not this session was terminated by me or whether there was some sort of error or something along those lines.
Right.
But it also captures all of the screenshots and the chat information as well. And, so then, I can go ahead and save this and it pops right into the ticket details in Web Help Desk. This is really nice, so one of the things that we've asked for a lot with Dameware and one of the things that we're actually working on right now is session logging information. With the Central Server componentry, we actually now have a springboard to incorporate those features. In the meantime, this is a really good proxy for that. So, if you've got both of these, you can actually store session details in Web Help Desk by using Dameware and launching it directly from Web Help Desk tickets.
How many times is it going to take, four or five visits to resolve something. Hopefully it doesn't.
But it might.
So, being able to save state for that session is really important.
Exactly.
Okay, so I do, so one question that I'm sure that they're going to have, which is about security and access context here. Can anyone who logs into Web Help Desk, essentially now have the ability to get remote access to any server in the system that happens to have a ticket?
That's a good question. So, the answer to that is no. It really depends on what kind of permissions you have set up on the Dameware side of the house. So, for example, if you're using a Dameware Central Server and you do not have a user account, but let's just say that you've got it installed on this machine. It's going to prompt you for a set of credentials to login to Dameware. If you can't provide those, it's not going to allow you to make the connection via Dameware.
Okay, awesome.
All right, so now we can save the details of this ticket. And you can see that it's been uploaded to Web Help Desk. We'll shut that down. And now we can go over to the Ticket Details and if we scroll down here.
Ah, there it is.
Yeah, absolutely. So you can see that basically what this does is it stores the chat in an RTF file format and it'll store any screenshots in PNG format. You can also launch, directly from asset information. The motion is exactly the same, so if I went over here under Assets and found that same computer, I could also launch directly from there. But, it looks exactly the same. The only thing that would be different here, is if I launched this irrespective of a ticket or not connected to a specific ticket, what you'll see and when we're closing down, is that it allows us to create a ticket from that spot right there.
Okay, oh that's even better.
Yeah.
Yeah, ‘cause I've never seen this machine before, I don't have a ticket open, somethings broken, they're calling me on the phone.
Right.
So you're going to skip the whole, did you open a ticket piece. You can immediately connect, then generate the ticket right there.
You got it.
That's great. How long were you guys working on this?
This took about three or four months for us to put together.
That's great.
Hey, the cart's gone.
And we got Tom and Leon back.
Yeah, but really, that was a really great demo. Thanks for walking us through that. You know, it's really funny, anytime we have integration based on Swis, it's always really smooth. So, I'm definitely going to have to check that out and really the question there, for me anyway, is the training environment for customers is actually hybrid cloud, not in Amazon. So then the question is, can I run it in hybrid cloud.
Yeah, absolutely.
Okay, yeah, being able to use the common host list would be really handy.
For sure.
Great.
You know, I'm looking around this set and I'm thinking to myself, I'm really going to miss this old set. I mean, is the new one anywhere near as amazing as this?
It's not exactly SportsCenter, but we're pretty sure that they're going to like it.
And how can the viewers be sure not to miss the premier with the new set?
Oh, that's easy. Just go to lab.solarwinds.com.
That's right. Well Glenn, thanks again for coming by today. And of course, Glenn’s going to be live on chat. If you're live with us and you've been to lab.solarwinds.com, so you knew about the live premier. And of course, he's always available in the Dameware forums on THWACK as well.
Well I really enjoyed it, thanks for having me gentlemen.
Yeah, you bet. Thanks for being here. Tom, you want to take us out?
Sure. I'm Thomas LaRock.
I'm Leon Adato.
I'm Lawrence Garvin.
Oh, and I'm Glenn Gray.
And I'm Patrick Hubbard. And thanks for watching Solar Winds Lab. 
