Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition--Help/Systems' Robot/Console Gets Proactive Resource Checking

OS/400 has excellent error-detection and logging features, but when it comes to lights-out automation, it can be hours before remote administrators are made aware of certain types of problems, such as looping jobs. Help/Systems is addressing these problems with a major new release of its messaging utility, Robot/Console 4.0, which brings the capability to immediately alert an administrator when resources are not in their defined state. The new version also monitors the system history log and the security audit journal.

Robot/Console's role in Help/Systems' Robot Automated Operations Solution suite of tools has always been message management and escalation. If you don't want to pay an operator to keep an eye on the QSYSOPR message log, install Robot/Console instead, and let it filter out the routine messages while promoting the important ones to the administrator, or running pre-set procedures to address conditions. To take it a step farther, combine Robot/Console with Robot/Alert, which pushes messages out to pagers and cell phones, and now your administrator can stay abreast of changing conditions from afar.

Over the years, many Robot/Console users have suggested ways for Help/Systems to enhance the product. Instead of reacting to error messages generated by OS/400, they asked that Robot/Console proactively make sure OS/400 resources--such as subsystems, jobs, applications, and devices--are working correctly.

That capability has been the number one most requested enhancement for the Robot/Console product among its 4,000 or so users, says Tom Huntington, Help/Systems vice president of technical services. Demand for this functionality was so great that Help/Systems considered developing an entirely new product to provide it. In the end, the ISO 9001-certified company from Minnetonka, Minnesota, decided to keep that capability within Robot/Console, and deliver it, after 15 months of development, with the 4.0 release it announced yesterday.

The new release greatly expands Robot/Console's monitoring capabilities, Huntington says. "Robot/Console has always monitored QSYSOPR," he says. "For most people, that's pretty good. It gets the majority of what's critical on the system. But some things don't generate messages."

For example, jobs stuck in a loop won't necessarily generate an error message, Huntington says, and neither will jobs that are being held up because TCP/IP services are down. You could have a bad situation brewing with 40 spool files backed up on an out queue, but you won't hear about it on the QSYSOPR.

Robot/Console 4.0 can simultaneously monitor many types of resources at pre-defined intervals, and send notification and start escalation procedures when anything goes awry. "You can say, 'I expect it to be in this state,' and if it's not in that state, it will generate a message," Huntington says. "With more server-oriented workloads, like J.D. Edwards, Domino, or HTTP, you need more than a subsystem running. You need 10 other jobs running, and this product can check to make sure that all those jobs are running."

Like airplane pilots, AS/400 and iSeries operators are trained to go through a check list to ensure things are running normally. "If you're running in a manned fashion, the first thing you do when you start a new shift is you're going to check to see, 'Is this job running, is this printer running, are the lines up?'" Huntington says. "You check to make sure all systems are go before you switch a shift. But instead of doing it once a day, or once a shift, you do it all the time" with Robot/Console.

In addition to monitoring QSYSOPR and the state of resources, Robot/Console 4.0 now monitors the system history log (QHIST) and the security audit journal, and generates messages when certain events take place. By monitoring these system logs, administrators can see at a glance who executed an FTP transaction, who modified a system value or an LPAR setting, or the number of objects that were not saved in the most recent backup, Help/Systems says.

This new capability to monitor the security audit journal should satisfy some companies' needs for basic security reporting, Huntington says. "It tackles some difficult issues for customers who don't want to buy a full-blown security package, but they want to log that activity and find out about it," he says.

Lastly, Robot/Console 4.0 adds another new "message groups" feature that should allow the product to react more appropriately, depending on the type of message it receives. Message groups allow users to group messages into logical categories based on the source of the message, such as by application, by programming groups, or other company-specific departments. Then, when a message arrives on a message queue, the message group can determine the type of processing that should take place, the company says.

Robot/Console 4.0 is available now. Pricing, which has gone up slightly due to the new features, ranges from $2,400 to $30,195. For more information, go to www.helpsystems.com.