FAQs

What is insure/MONITOR and how is it different than anything else on the market?

insure/MONITOR is a real-time activity window that captures, organizes and displays key system and application metrics. This IT management tool provides powerful, flexible views into the AS/400 or iSeries. It also addresses key issues in efficiently monitoring complex applications with a large number of users.

insure/MONITOR gives "deep status visibility" to the systems management team. Problems are identified quickly, so effective action can be taken early and accurately.

How does the information and functionality that insure/MONITOR provides differentiate it from other tools?

insure/MONITOR goes beyond the basic job monitoring of traditional tools. Today, IT is expected to make sure that systems work and that critical applications perform. This means high availability and fast transaction/query processing. To succeed, IT needs timely, specific, and in-depth information - without becoming overwhelmed by raw data that provides no value.

For example, client/server applications are notoriously difficult to monitor and manage. Because these applications are distributed, it is more difficult to determine who the real user is and what they are doing in real-time. We solve this problem by providing comprehensive activity and user tracking so system operators and application administrators can perform more/better pro-active problem identification and diagnosis.

How does insure/MONITOR enable pro-active system management?

One key to effective application and systems management is to detect potential problems early and take corrective action. Through early detection, issues that arise can be addressed quickly so they impact a minimum number of people. With the current trend of system consolidation, this becomes an even more important mission. Again, insure/MONITOR provides selective application and system metrics to allow application and systems managers to react quickly and respond with the right information.

Additional real-time monitoring technologies offered by Leftfield fully integrate with insure/MONITOR to expand the system or application views desired. Currently, insure/MONITOR can be enhanced with modules like:

• disk/HUNTER to control disk spikes and manage IFS activity
• insure/RESOURCES to monitor/control query activity

What information does insure/MONITOR provide that is difficult to obtain with traditional methods?

At a basic level, insure/MONITOR provides job information normally obtained with the use of green-screen commands like Work Active Jobs (WRKACTJOB). This includes basic information such as job priority, run statistics, locks, open files, and the job log. Our approach to information displays in insure/MONITOR however, has the advantage of being searchable and can be sorted easily to make the data more useful. Further, graphical views of numeric data are provided to make interpretation easier.

Secondly, unique information is provided that is impossible, difficult or awkward to obtain without insure/MONITOR. For example, the last requests for middleware such as ODBC are surfaced so operations and programming personnel can see client/server flows. Furthermore, this allows IT to see what "applications" users are accessing as well as the objects those interfaces are accessing (e.g. what files are being downloaded by an FTP user).

Thirdly, insure/MONITOR can be upgraded to focus on critical applications. For example, with insure/MONITOR for OneWorld®, the OneWorld application can be isolated so the systems operator can quickly focus their monitoring efforts. In this enhanced version, insure/MONITOR for OneWorld® contains information specific to JDE OneWorld such as the JDE user and group profile names associated with an active job (as opposed to the system user and group profiles which are also shown for each job).

Lastly, the information display can be fully customized. For example, different data views are built into insure/MONITOR to allow the user to quickly switch between topical areas such as performance and TCP/IP information.

What are some typical problems that insure/MONITOR can solve?

insure/MONITOR can help identify a wide variety of system and application problems including intense queries, lock contention, runaway jobs, application errors/messages, and excessive temporary storage use. Because of its flexible and customizable display, a systems operator can fine-tune the data displays to address their specific priorities, needs, and procedures.

Can insure/MONITOR be used to remotely monitor a system?

Yes. insure/MONITOR is built using an efficient data stream using TCP/IP sockets. This makes it usable over dial-up connections with good performance. The TCP/IP port can be configured (changed) to work with most firewalls to allow access over the Internet.

What does lock/DETECTOR do?

lock/DETECTOR provides administrators a fast, easy way to identify the root cause of locking conflicts. With a single command, lock/DETECTOR will help you determine:

• What kind of lock is being waited for (object or record lock)
• Which job/user owns the lock being requested
• The identity of the user associated with the job
• What action to take once the root cause has been identified

What are the main benefits of lock/DETECTOR?

If a lock problem surfaces on an iSeries, it is not straightforward to find the root cause of the problem. Administrators must sort through hundreds if not thousands of jobs while attempting to identify what kind of lock is being waited for and who owns the lock being requested. Even after identification, action still can't be taken until the administrator has an understanding of who owns the job and what processes are being run.

What information does lock/DETECTOR give me when there is a problem?

lock/DETECTOR can be run interactively to display the results either on screen or in a printable report. It can also deliver the results in text format to the message queue so integration with products by messaging vendors like BytWare, Help Systems and Tango/04 will provide automated lock detection, notification and diagnostics. lock/DETECTOR provides the following information:

• Fully qualified job name of waiting job
• Fully qualified job name of holding job
• Type of lock being held/requested (object or record lock)
• Name of the object (e.g. database file)
• Database file member name (if applicable)
• Object type
• Object attribute
• Record number (if this is a record lock)
• User profile of waiting job
• Group profile of waiting job
• User profile of holder job
• Group profile of holder job

How long does it take lock/DETECTOR to find the cause of the problem?

Even on a large System i, it will only take lock/DETECTOR seconds to identify the conflicts and produce the information about the locks. Because lock/DETECTOR quickly hones in on just the jobs that are in a lock wait condition, the process is fast.

What are the main benefits of sql/OPTIMIZER?

sql/OPTIMIZER simplifies application and report development for System i by providing a single interface to write, test, and performance tune SQL statements.

Developers and IT personnel responsible for SQL-based applications can use sql/OPTIMIZER to improve their understanding of query optimization and tuning. By showing the query optimizer?s access plan graphically to explain each step in the execution of a statement, complex information and system algorithms are more easily understood and improved.

sql/OPTIMIZER surfaces all of the statistics, index information, and tuning options so developers can create, analyze and tune their statements from a single, point-and-click interface.