ELM Enterprise Manager is a true workhorse for centralizing event log management, monitoring specific processes and services, performance and status, and providing both notification and reporting to make your life easier. But did you know that there are all kinds of shortcuts built into the product to save you even more time?

This article will take a look at some of the cool time saving, and sometimes hidden shortcuts available for performing a number of tasks on each Agent in your environment.

If we expand Monitoring – All Agents we can click on an Agent, in this case SalesLab2, and view the Agent At-a-Glance information screen. Immediately we can see that SalesLab2 is not responding. Here’s where the shortcuts come into play, saving us some time in troubleshooting.

By right-clicking in the At-a-Glance screen we have access to a number of helpful shortcuts. (Depending on where you right click, the menu may look slightly different thanks primarily to behaviors within the MMC itself.) Note that on the menu items where the name is specified in parentheses, and highlighted in blue for illustration purposes, that ELM will automatically launch that utility and connect it to the SalesLab2 machine (or whatever machine you are viewing At-a-Glance information on). The menu items without parentheses will launch their respective utility and run locally without automatically connecting to the remote machine.

ELM Shortcuts 1

ELM Event Generator
The first option in the menu is the ELM Event Generator, which is designed to help test settings such as filters in Event Views and Notifications to make sure that you have configured them properly.

The Event Generator can generate test events from a variety of log types and sources. Series of events can be generated on different time intervals and multiple event generators can be run at the same time to create a more dynamic testing environment.

ELM Shortcuts 2

PING
The next shortcut option is to PING SalesLab2. Sure you could fire up a command prompt on the machine you are on and type this in manually, or you could click this shortcut and let ELM do it quickly for you.

ELM Shortcuts 3

Windows Computer Management
We can move on to the shortcut for SalesLab2 to open the Windows Computer Management console. This opens locally but is automatically connected to SalesLab2 for us so that items can be reviewed more quickly.

ELM Shortcuts 4

Windows Event Viewer
Sometimes it makes sense to take a look at the Windows Event Viewer on a troubled system. The shortcut from this menu will open the Event Viewer locally and automatically connect to SalesLab2 so that we can view the event activity.

ELM Shortcuts 5

Windows Service Manager
Windows Service Manager can be launched locally from this menu and automatically connected to SalesLab2 for us so that we can troubleshoot problems with services stopping, and restarting.

ELM Shortcuts 6

Windows System Information
We can also jump right into Windows System Information for SalesLab2 with the shortcut here. The System Information opens locally and once again automatically connects to SalesLab2 so we can quickly gather the specs we need.

ELM Shortcuts 7

Windows Terminal Services
The final shortcut from this menu we’ll cover is a direct link to fire up a Remote Desktop connection to SalesLab2. ELM initiates the connection for you so you are off and running quickly and smoothly.

ELM Shortcuts 8

We hope that you found this set of shortcuts useful and will be able to put them to use in your workday to save some time and wish you continued success with ELM.