CCSS Overhauls iSeries System Monitoring Tool

Published: September 19, 2006

by Alex Woodie

CCSS, a developer of OS/400 systems management utilities, introduced a new version of its flagship QSystem Monitor product yesterday at the Fall 2006 COMMON conference in Miami. Version 12 brings an array of new features, including network monitoring capabilities and more flexibility in how administrators view metrics. In fact, CCSS says it has made such extensive changes to the product that it barely resembles previous releases.

In this age of heightened regulatory and budget pressures, you can ill afford to not know what is going on with your servers. QSystem Monitor is one of the established tools that helps you to keep an eye on your OS/400 server's performance, including database CPU usage, interactive processing per logical partition, and I/O activity. Administrators can simultaneously monitor dozens of these types of performance metrics, which are displayed on a graphical client called the Online Monitor.

With QSystem Monitor Version 12, the first new version of the product in more that three years, CCSS has added more than 100 new "monitors," or agents designed to measure specific IT resources. Perhaps the most significant addition are new monitors for keeping watch on the health of the network, including network and communications error monitoring that highlight network bottlenecks and errors, and monitors that watch the System i's I/O processors (IOPs).

The new network monitors will be a boon for QSystem Monitor users, predicts Paul Ratchford, product manager at CCSS. "The new network monitors will save support staff a lot of time when trying to resolve network issues, and if it saves time it saves money," he says.

QSystem Monitor 12 introduces new system-level monitoring capabilities as well, including new monitors for memory pools, the capability to automatically control jobs that are using excessive CPU, and new cross-system PTF reporting features.

CCSS has also expanded QSystem Monitor's coverage in other areas, including disk, job, and availability monitoring. On the availability front, version 12 users get full monitoring of job, communication, and network interface status. In terms of disk monitoring, the product can now monitor temporary storage usage by job, user, subsystem, or the entire system, in addition to monitoring object size and independent auxiliary storage pools (iASPs), CCSS says.

New job monitoring features include the capability to monitor all job statuses, including lock wait, so that users can tell when jobs are in a specific status, as well as the capability to monitor job components, including number of threads, which allows users to check whether jobs are running correctly, the company says.

Taken together, the new version of QSystem Monitor marks a radical change in how QSystem Monitor allows users to monitor their systems, Ratchford says.

"Previously, we had always worked within a rigid framework. With this version, customers can determine both what they want to monitor and how they want the data presented to them," Ratchford says. "The key word is 'flexibility.' Now customers have a completely blank palette to work from. In fact, we have received two comments from our beta sites stating that QSystem Monitor Version 12 is almost like a brand new product, now that they can define and shape the way their monitors look."

QSystem Monitor 12 is available now. The company is demonstrating the new product at this week's COMMON conference. For more information, check out CCSS' Web site at www.ccssltd.com.

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