Who’s Watching i? The Kisco, Kid
November 20, 2019 Alex Woodie
Administrators today don’t have the time to sit at their consoles, waiting for things to happen. That’s a luxury that few are afforded. Instead, admins want to be notified when something happens – good, bad, or otherwise. One of the tools that makes this happen is Kisco’s iEventMonitor, which was recently upgraded with several new watch functions.
Kisco Information Systems launched iEventMonitor several years ago as an affordable utility for keeping an eye on IBM i job and message queues, as well as storage and CPU usage. When things start to go wrong on a monitored IBM i server, iEventMonitor sends out alerts in the form of an email, an SMS text, or a break message on the console. Alternatively, the software can be configured to automatically call a user program when certain messages are received.
With Release 4, Kisco has updated the product with several new capabilities, as well as improvements to existing functions. Let’s start with the improvements to existing functions first.
iEventMonitor has always been able to monitor QSYSOPR, the system operator message queue, as well as the security event message queue, QSYSMSG, Kisco says.
With Release 4, it’s bolstered the product with the capability to issue optional reminders when a message has not been responded to in a given period of time. The job watch, meanwhile, is now looking for jobs that have been put on hold, or if a job has been running longer than expected.
On the security front, the audit monitor now has a new option to let users track command line use for registered user profiles. All command line activity is reported in detail, Kisco says. Finally, administrators will appreciate that how Kisco is giving them more control individual tasks running in iEventMonitor.
The new functions added to iEventMonitor include:
- An output queue watch that triggers when there are too many jobs waiting to be printed
- A user profile watch that alerts when a specific user has signed on or off a system
- A text string watch that alerts when a specific message text is posted to a message queue
- A job watch function that triggers when a job goes into Mutex Wait status
- A job watch function that triggers when a job goes into Lock Wait status
iEventMonitor Release 4 runs on every release of the IBM i operating system from version 7.1 to 7.4. Licenses start at $495 for a single partition, while $795 gets you a license that runs on an unlimited number of LPARs. For more information, see www.kisco.com.
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