Centerfield Adds E-Mail Notification with disk/HUNTER 2.0

Published: June 13, 2006

by Alex Woodie

When DASD usage starts to spike, you have only so much time to react before the situation turns negative. With that in mind, the folks at Centerfield Technology recently bolstered its OS/400 DASD monitoring tool, disk/HUNTER, with better communication facilities.

disk/HUNTER works by taking disk utilization data from a system's Performance Explorer (PEX) facility and compiling it into a format that's easier to read and use. The software lets systems administrators quickly find out which jobs are consuming disk, what objects are associated with those jobs, and who created the jobs--all the things that an administrator needs to know when he has to manually go in and stop a process before it brings down a system.

In previous releases of disk/HUNTER, the tool would, by default, send a message to the systems administrator whenever a preset disk utilization threshold was reached. However, the administrator still had to get a green screen to consume the diagnostic report required to fix the problem. This could slow the resolution time.

Now, with disk/HUNTER version 2.0, administrators can receive notification and the necessary diagnostic reports all through e-mail, which should make it easier to track down and fix iSeries disk problems.

"Although many of our customers in the past have used third-party messaging software to provide notification, they have still needed to get to a green screen to view the reports," says Centerfield Technology CTO Mark Holm. "Now they will automatically receive e-mailed reports of both spike occurrence and diagnostics."

disk/Hunter 2.0 will start shipping this month. Licenses will start at $3000 per iSeries server.