Installing Starfish Arm
Getting up and running with Starfish Arm

Starfish Arm is a secure, lightweight agent service that Starfish Monitor uses to monitor particular server. Starfish Arm runs as a Windows Service, and is installed on all of the machines that you plan to monitor, such as your application and web servers.

In essence, Arm is a server probe. It constantly gathers data and sends them to back to the Starfish Monitor server.

Requirements

  • Windows Server 2008 R2,
    Windows Server 2012,
    Windows Server 2012 R2,
    (Both "Server Core" and "Server with a GUI" installations are supported for Starfish Arm)
  • .NET Framework
  • Hardware minimum: 256MB RAM, 0,5GHz CPU, 10MB free disk space

Starfish Arm uses a pretty small amount of memory when idle, usually around 15MB (it may appear higher in task manager because memory is shared with other .NET processes that are running).

Starfish Arm will happily run on single-core machines, and only uses less then 10MB of disk space.

Installation

Starfish Monitor and Starfish Arm must be configured to communicate with each other over your network.

Starfish Arm needs to know the Starfish Monitor's address and certificate thumbprint.

After the Starfish Monitor installation you'll be presented with the following screen:

Starfish Monitor start screen showing server address and thumbprint

Note the Starfish Monitor's address and certificate thumbprint.

Download the Starfish Arm installer

During the arm installation you'll be asked to provide Starfish Monitor's address and certificate thumbprint:

Startfish Arm installer screen

SSL offloading is not supported

The communication protocol used by Starfish Monitor and Starfish Arm requires intact end-to-end TLS connection for message encryption, tamper-proofing, and authentication. For this reason SSL offloading is not supported.

After installation, Starfish Arm runs as a Windows Service named Starfish.Arm.

Cloning Starfish Arm VMs

The installation process generates a unique per-machine cryptographic certificate that should not be duplicated.

  • To recreate the certificate you'll need to stop the service,
  • delete "C:\​ProgramData\​Starfish.Arm\​Starfish.Arm.pfx" and
  • run "C:\Program Files\​Starfish.Arm\​Starfish.Arm\​{latest version e.g.'1.0.16249.1802'}\​Starfish.Arm.Service.exe -GenerateCertificate".

Permissions

By default, the Starfish.Arm Windows Service runs under the Local System context.

Health check

You can visit http://localhost:10777 on the monitored server to check if Arm was able to connect to your Starfish Monitor server.

If everything is OK you should see "Starfish Arm is connected." message.