Introduction
GSX released the point release of their monitor/Analyzer product in early May 2010. It’s no secret I am a fan of the product, warts and all. The depth of the features available and the level of detail in the gsx monitor suite is very impressive. Their achelees heel is the UI. Some of the best features are not intuitively visible, and you really need a diving suit to get into its depths. So 9.3 is hot off the press and armed with my 9.2 software, and test servers built and operational, I fire everything up and get ready to go.
The aim of this review is to test the upgrade process from 9.2 to 9.3, asses the new features (as per release notes and pdf files available from the gsx site, and give my thoughts on what was done. To keep things simple, I will look at the new features of monitor and Analyzer in turn.
Starting with 9.2, here are screenshots of monitor and Analyzer on my XP vm.
Figure 1 - GSX monitor 9.2
Figure 2 - GSX Analyzer 9.2
Upgrading
After backing up the configuration files I shut down GSX Monitor and kicked off the upgrade to 9.3. The installation itself is almost flawless. Being cocky I decided to not bother with looking at upgrade instructions and just “go at it” head on.
After kicking the install, you get the option to install Analyzer, Monitor or both. I chose both.
Figure 3 - GSX Installation options
The installation kicks off by installing Analyzer, but at the end of the process, it gives you the option to launch the GUI. You then get this error.
Figure 4 - GSX Analyzer install issue
Then, it shifts to the Monitor install. This is more of an uninstall/install process then an upgrade. When finished, you are asked if you wish to start the product. I click on yes which gives you option to run as an application or a service.
Figure 5 - GSX Monitor start options
As Monitor is typically run as a windows service, I select that. Wrong choice. Monitor needs to be launched as an application post upgrade to finish the
database upgrade. Surely the product should just not offer to launch as a service then?
I restart the OS and launch GSX Monitor as an application.
Figure 6 - GSX Monitor upgrade
So, what does the new version look like? Well, here is GSX Monitor 9.3. Not too different at first look.
Figure 7 - GSX Monitor 9.2
Analyzer 9.3 looks more refined from the outset with some additional features. Note I am running this in firefox.
Figure 8 - GSX Analyzer 9.3
GSX Monitor 9.3 features
Now to review the new features of GSX Monitor. Using the pdf available from
http://www.gsx.net as a guide lets go through what is new.
Product support
First off the bat, GSX Monitor/Analyzer supports Domino 851 officially (9.2 works fine with 851). Considering the uptake of upgrades in Domino, this is a very wise move. BES 5.0 and exchange 2010 are also now officially supported.
Scheduled maintenance improvement
One of the first areas in GSX Monitor that used to drive me insane was the scheduled maintenance feature. The feature allows you to specify times when GSX monitor would “ignore” any downtime. This allowed us admins to shut down services without affecting our uptime statistics. A lovely feature, but Monitor’s implementation of it was clunky and not centrally managed.
In 9.3 schedule profiles can be created (e.g. quarter end) and they can be applied to servers as needed. The interface is much improved (with calendar view for visual perspective on downtime) and ability to see what profiles are applied to servers if needed. This is much nicer.
Figure 9 Scheduled downtime1
Figure 10 - View servers that have scheduled downtime applied
Figure 11 - View scheduled downtime in calendar
On the plus side, this is a drastic improvement. But GSX need to include tim– ezone support for server schedules. Not all servers are in the same time zone as your monitor box! Additionally, I think a toolbar option called “downtime schedules” would make it easier to find these options.
Alert profile improvement
Alerts are the ability to notify selected people (by many methods) if a threshold/trigger is reached. Similar to the scheduled maintenance issues, centralized viewing of profiles and application was just not available. This has also been improved in 9.3
Figure 12 - Improved profile management
But again, although improved, a better UI and centralized management could be created.
Better domino clustering monitoring
9.3 brings with it a strong focus on service availability. Domino has now got its own cluster replica configuration area in monitor under server settings and Statistics. In fairness to the product, as it monitors from a workstation, GSX Monitor has always been cluster aware and able to give statistics on cluster uptime. Now it goes deeper, giving vital infrastructure statistics when needed. For example, GSX now gathers statistics on work.queue.depth and
seconds.on.queue for the admin. It doesn’t do this like competitive products (that monitor all stats). GSX lets you gather selected statistics and then set thresholds against them for alerts. Nice. Cluster traffic, failed replications etc are all gathered for you.
Figure 13 - GSX Cluster monitoring
One area I would love to see is a monitor of the transinfo_range feature in Domino. GSX could easily monitor peak times on a domino server and use the “sh ai” feature to tell admins what to set expansion factor and transinfo to per server, therefore making the availability index useful (see next point).
Server availability monitoring/threshold
Monitor now can scan availability thresholds and create alerts as needed. Although this is a useful feature, it is not useful at all if the availability index is not set correctly by calculating the expansion factor at peak usage.
Figure 14 - GSX Monitor availability threshold settings
Catagorising and tagging servers
9.3 gives you the ability to “tag” servers and group them together by
organization or function. You can create organistaions or use the default, and you can also create the tags as needed. This can then be used to group data displayed or limit access to specific tagged servers.
Figure 15 - GSX server tagging
The jury is out on the implementation of this, as I will have to see it in the real world. The concept is great but I wanted to tag a server as Domino and BES but couldn’t. I know I can go to the BES section and tag servers as BES, but it just felt like the implementation was clunky. Let’s see what happens with tagging in analyzer.
BES carrier monitoring
GSX Monitor already has BES monitoring out of the box. It can give you great information on BES performance and drill down to the user. A new feature is the ability to monitor carrier performance. As an admin you can set monitor to give
information on multiple carriers and set thresholds on when there is no connectivity. This small feature gives a lot of return though.
1 – I can check to see if a carrier is down
2 – I can gather some “real world” statistics on carrier strength in my demographic
3 – I can see who is on what carrier (roaming charges?)
Not only this, but you can set a “control” device in your monitoring. If there are reports of 50% people not having access to a carrier (lets say O2 UK in London), if the control device still connects ok, this will not generate an alert.
BES Data monitoring (Consolidated view)
When demoing GSX Monitor’s Blackberry functionality, admins always loved the audit information and monitoring ability on a per user/device level. This, in my opinion, was more functional then BES 5.0’s basic admin interface. With 9.3 there is an improved “single click” review of a BES server or user available, giving all statistics needed. Very, very useful.
DB Monitoring improvements
There are new default database monitor reports built directly into monitor. In the DB Size and quota monitoring, there is now an ability to have automatic reports that scan for databases over a specific size, specific % of quota, exceeding specific quota, exceeding assigned quota or even (my favorite) listing database with no quota specified. Again, very useful real world reports at a touch of a button. Also the reports can be broken down into organistaions specified earlier (i.e. reports for only specific groups of servers).
Figure 16 - GSX Monitor new database reports
My biggest gripe about the monitors available is the server/database selection window. It is horribly unintuitive and unfortunately GSX have not improved this.
Figure 17 - GSX Monitor report server selection
GSX Analyzer 9.3 features
It’s obvious that this point release has more focus on the newer, prettier analyzer tool then the old “nuts and bolts” monitor tool. This is a good thing. For those that are never sure how these products break down. Think of the Monitor as the data gathering engine. Analyzer is the “pretty output” tool of the results. Some of the older features in Monitor (e.g. Graphs) will eventually go away as Analyzer takes up all output features. This is a good thing. It will stop confusion.
So lets go through the analyzer newbies!
First things first, Analyzer 9.3 feels faster on the same spec machine. I have a VM running 9.2 cloned and upgraded to 9.3, and there is a noticeable speed
improvement. This cannot be verified until it is out in the wild though.
New administration interface
Something that was badly needed. Analyzer now has a “configuration utility”. It is part of the install and from here you can perform administrative tasks (which I will get to in the coming points).
Figure 18 - GSX Analyzer 9.3 Manager interface
You can also work with the cassini web server (the default server for Analyzer) and start/stop that service. You can integrate with IIS if that is your platform of choice. Database management, password reset of back end data, backups of the data can all be completed here (some of these features can also be automated). There is a data merge tool which can combine outputs from multiple monitor stations. This is useful in the case of a rename of GSX monitor stations (which could cause duplicate name results in Analyzer).
Finally, the Analyzer log can be reviewed to see if there are any errors in analyzer output.
User Profiles
One failing of the last version of analyzer was the access levels. You had anonymous or admin level and.. em.. that was it. 9.3 brings granular profile levels of security to the server. Now, you can create profiles and assign users to them.
Complete this by creating accounts first and assigning them to the organizations created in monitor.
By going to the tools/admin area, you can create profiles by clicking on the ADD button. Well, you are supposed to but it is grayed out. Unfortunately you have to select an organization (which you created in Monitor) before you can create profiles. This is a known design issue, which will be addressed. After you do this, you can create your user and assign profiles to their account. Users can
have multiple profiles assigned and get to choose which one to use when logging in to Analyzer. So you can have read only access to one organization area and full admin to another. For example, the admin in the EMEA region may want to be able to play with analytical charting for “his” servers. But he may only have read access to ones in different regions.
Figure 19 - GSX Analyzer. Access levels
Figure 20 - GSX Analyzer - assign tags
Figure 21 - GSX Analyzer assign users
You can remove anonymous access totally (or give very limited data) You can create a user with admin rights over a specific region
You can create a user with read rights over a region and admin rights over another
You can limit what any individual user sees.
In the era of SLA’s and large-‐scale monitoring/auditing, this is a required feature. One comment to be made is that the accounts are created and managed by GSX, and there is no LDAP lookup functionality as yet.
Default Trend reports readymade
Analyzer gives you the ability to create reports (called Trends) since 9.2. In 9.3 they pre-‐create default report templates for you, which you can manually or automatically generate on schedules. This is FANTASTIC. You just pick the server. GSX have picked the generic things you may want a report on about, for example, disk space. You just choose the servers.
Figure 23 - GSX Analyzer template selection
In essence, you are giving your line manager, CTO, audit person or consultant everything they may want to know about performance and usage in a few clicks. It doesn’t get better then this.
Which brings me to the main issue I have with GSX. UI and naming. There are improvements in this area, but still it is woefully unintuitive. There is a section called “reports” which outputs any flags caught in servers by GSX Monitor (for example, log.nsf and the word corrupt). And then there is “trends”, which ARE REPORTS. Please GSX… close your eyes. Take a breath and open them. Lets get the naming correct because you have the hard work done!
Environmental Health reports
This is a brand new feature with 9.3 and brings with it a new level of dimension to SLA management and leveraging this product.
Environmental health allows you to choose benchmark statistics and mark them as an SLA “contract”. i.e. if the stat exceeds your contract, you are in breach of your SLA. Not only that, it also allows you to flag Key Performance Indicators for the particular SLA. So, you can say that server uptime is SLA “able” and you can create an environmental health report to display this for servers over periods of time. You can also display KPI’s like network uptime, CPU availability, RAM, Disk availability etc so they are displayed in the same graph. This gives you an ability to see any possible issues that may affect your SLA.
The implementation of this new feature is done quite well, created through the TOOLS option. There are pre-‐built templates to get you started. For example, one on uptime.
Figure 24 - Environmental health templates
Figure 25 - Selecting SLA's and KPI's
Figure 26 - Advanced options per statistic
One of the key features of Environmental health is the ability to display average values on your graphs for all servers. In other words, you can look at server statistics and compare them immediately to all other servers in your
organization (or what servers you have permitted access to). One point to be made about this feature though is that it requires you to work at it to get value. If I was to start using this as my defacto SLA benchmark facility I would want to have carefully selected the SLA, contracts and KPI’s to maximize results. That being said, the potential depth of this feature warrants the work required. The next screenshots are taken from GSX servers (my test environment does not have enough monitored data to show the potential output).
Figure 27 - Environmental health output 1
Figure 28 - Environmental health output 2
Summary
GSX Monitor and Analyzer are two of the strongest tools in my arsenal when caring for an environment. In my opinion they are not plug and play monitoring tools at all. They require work, configuration and respect. But the return is immense.
All in all 9.3 has a lot of new features for a simple point release. Some of the issues with the product have been resolved, but there is more to complete. I look forward to the 10.0 release next year but after spending a day with this build, the upgrade to 9.3 alone is worth it.