MeshCentral - MeshCentral Assistant Tray Icon Tool

This week we have an exciting new experimental tool for MeshCentral called the “MeshCentral Assistant”. This is a Windows tray icon tool that runs alongside the MeshAgent and will monitor and report in real time the state of the agent, what remote sessions are active, the state of Intel AMT and allows the users to request help. To try this tool, administrators must first update to MeshCentral v0.6.61. Let’s look at the features of this new tool:

  • MeshAgent monitoring. The tray icon tool will monitor the state of the agent and report if that Windows service is running and if the agent is connected to the MeshCentral server. MeshCentral assistant can obtain this information because the MeshAgent has a new named pipe communication channel can be used on the local platform to get live state changes from the agent. The tool does not poll the agent, instead the pipe is connected, and the agent will send events when anything changes.
  • Request help. Users can now request help thru the new application. At a click of a button, users are prompted for a short text of what is being asked and when they click ok, the request is forwarded to the server that displays a popup on all administrator accounts that have rights to this device. In addition, there is a question mark icon next to the device that will be shown until the request for help is canceled. Lastly, as an administrator you can now filter devices by “help” to only show devices with pending help requests.
  • Live session monitoring. The MeshCentral Assistant tool will display in real-time how many remote sessions are currently active. When a remote administrator performs a remote desktop, terminal or file operating on the device, the Assistant will show this in the remote session dialog box. The sessions also show the user account that is performing the operation. This feature is perfect for auditing who is connected on your local device.
  • Intel® ME state. The assistant tool can ask the MeshAgent to query the state of the Intel® Management Engine and display the results. Initially, this will be used to debug Intel® AMT state, but in the future, this feature can be used to perform many more management operations using Intel hardware.

You can download the MeshCentral Assistant here. Many thanks to the Bryan Roe this week who added support for the named pipe system in the MeshAgent. This new system will be useful to enable many more usages in the future. Looking forward to feedback on this tool before it’s included in MeshCentral. As usual, feedback appreciated. If you see any problems and need support on something, please create a new issue on GitHub or help other users.

Enjoy,
Ylian
Twitter: https://twitter.com/meshcentral
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/MeshCentral/
GitHub: https://github.com/Ylianst/MeshCentral/issues
MeshCentral2: http://www.meshcommander.com/meshcentral2





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