The Operating Systems Agent (OS Agent) is a lightweight configurable console application that responds to remote commands and reports status information for the machine on which it is running.  It provides distributed test or exercise environments with system-level status information (e.g., CPU utilization, disk space availability, memory usage, executing processes, etc.) Starship II is an application that subscribes to the information that OS Agent is publishing.

The Starship II communications architecture uses the Test and Training Enabling Architecture (TENA) Middleware to facilitate the information exchange between Starship II and the OS Agent.  Starship II subscribes to the TENA Standard Application Management Object (AMO) to provide an initial level of monitoring and control.  In addition, Starship II uses application-specific extensions of the AMO to provide more detailed monitoring and control interfaces for many applications. Starship II also uses a proprietary Distributed Test Control Object Model for exchange of Starship relevant information between intercommunicating Starship II nodes deployed within a large distributed exercise. TENA is part of a coordinated response by the Central Test and Evaluation Investment Program (CTEIP) office to develop a common architecture in support of test and training applications and promote test range interoperability.  Starship II has leveraged the CTEIP TENA effort to build a TENA compliant distributed test command and control architecture.

The OS Agent provides:

• Information about the performance of a computer and the programs and processes that are running on it much like the information the Windows Task manager provides.

• A means to start and stop processes

• Monitoring of Event Logs (security, system, application, etc.)

• A Secure File Transfer capability

• A remote capability to shut down or reboot a workstation

• Verification of the synchronization of system clocks
   

The data reported by the OS Agents includes:

• a list of processes executing on the computer

• process status

• disk space utilization

• memory utilization

• timestamps

• CPU utilization

• context switches

• paging files utilization

• server performance
  

The Starship II operator uses the information obtained from workstations containing an installed OS Agent to remotely assess the health and operation of the workstation as well as its applications.  Using Starship II, conditional limits can be set on any parameter that reports to the OS Agent. When the defined limits are met, exceeded or not met, a threshold is tripped and the Starship II Operator is notified.

The OS Agents execute commands that are issued by Starship II.  Starship II can remotely start or terminate processes (such as a time sync checks), subject to limitations in the security privileges granted to the OS Agent.