Hyena simplifies Windows management tasks

SystemTools.com's Hyena is a powerful, all-in-one system management tool that consolidates many disparate views of your enterprise and your system into one console. Because the breadth of the tools available in Hyena can be a little bewildering, here are some tips to help you get the most from the program:

• Device drivers are listed under "Devices," while system services are in "Services." In some versions of Windows, device drivers were listed as system services; in Windows Server 2003, device drivers no longer appear as services. Hyena has the complete complement of system device drivers listed under the "Devices" subsection for a given machine. There, they can be examined, stopped, restarted, have their dependencies analyzed or obtain other information such as the path to the executable used for the driver.

• How to add new devices or services immediately. You can right-click on Devices or Services and select Install to add a new service to the system through an interactive wizard. You can even specify any load-ordering group information for the executable.

• How to use event log filtering. Hyena doesn't just give you access to event logs; it also provides a powerful filtering system to screen out everything you don't want to see. Right-click on Events in a given system's utility tree and select "Filter events" to filter events by event ID, date range, user/group name, and event type and to process events in ascending or descending order. The filter can also work on multiple logs at once.

• How to enable advanced Active Directory support if you're an AD guru. By default, Hyena only shows a basic set of Active Directory objects and Organizational Units. If you're an AD wiz and want access to a broader range of AD objects, go to Tools | Settings | Active Directory and check "Show all Active Directory system objects."

• How to enable Exchange 200x integration. If you're running Exchange in the same organization in which you're using Hyena, be sure to enable Hyena's support for Exchange objects (which isn't turned on by default). In Tools | Settings | Exchange 200x, check "Enable Exchange Integration."

Return to Readers' Choice: 15 admin tools you can't live without!.