Prerequisites - HiltonGiesenow/PoShMon GitHub Wiki

Aside from downloading and installation PoShMon, there are two main prerequisites to getting up and running, and both relating to making sure that PoShMon can remotely connect to the servers you want to monitor. Even if you're running it from one of the servers in the group, you'd still need to set these up, especially for a 'farm' environment where certain commands may still need to execute on the respective servers.

TL;DR

The paragraphs below will explain what's required, but in short, execute the following commands from directly on each of the servers you want to monitor. The Credentials would be the account that will be running some of your commands - as an example, for SharePoint, you might choose to use the Farm account.

Enable-PSRemoting

Register-PSSessionConfiguration -Name 'SpFarmPosh' -RunAsCredential (Get-Credential -UserName "[domain]\[account]" -Message "RunAsCredential")

Take note of the 'Name' you choose to use - that's the one you'll be setting in the PoShMonConfiguration later.

PowerShell Remoting

While PoShMon is indeed "agent-less", it does need to execute remote PowerShell commands against the servers in question. As a result, you need to ensure that PowerShell remoting is correctly configured and also that you are running PoShMon under an account that has the correct rights to connect to the server remotely and execute the requisite commands.

Double-Hop Issues

In addition to ensuring PowerShell remoting itself is working correctly, you also need to ensure that commands that access other environments further down the line (most commonly SQL Server) have a means to pass on credentials effectively and securely. Essentially, this relates to the age-old "Double Hop" issue - we're trying to connect remotely to, say, a SharePoint environment and we in turn need access to SQL Server. This issue is described more fully in a PowerShell context here and this link provides a means for creating more secure connections instead of using CredSSP. More on this appears below in the SharePoint example further down. You can test with SharePoint, for example, by creating a session from a remote machine (say your workstation) and executing Get-SPFarm - if that works successfully, you're probably good to go with PoShMon.

Next Steps

With these prerequisites set up, the next step is to head over to the Getting Started guide to start your monitoring.