Is Global Monitor a worthwhile investment?

[Mike Strout]

I have been pretty interested in GM since I first heard about it a few years ago and am wondering if it delivers on its promises of increased efficiency in real-world applications? We are in the middle of our budgeting season and I am looking for some real justifications for the pretty spendy purchase.

I also included a poll with this post to see what percentage of Cloverleaf shops make use of it.

Topic

[Jim Kosloskey]

Mike I did not answer the poll because we have it bu are not acttively using it right now and I did not see a selecttion for that situation.

email: jim.kosloskey@jim-kosloskey.com 30+ years Cloverleaf, 60 years IT – old fart.

[Mike Strout]

Interesting. I thought for sure you would be an advocate. I just went through the marketing overview for it and added comments beside all the functions I thought we would benefit from as an organization. I am especially interested in the enhanced SMAT file access and searching capabilities.

[Jim Kosloskey]

Mike,

I am an advocate. I was just reporting it is installed here but as far as I know not in use.

We do not have a central Operations staff monitoring our integrations which I think is its greatest (but not only) value thus I guess there is no urgency to put it to use.

email: jim.kosloskey@jim-kosloskey.com 30+ years Cloverleaf, 60 years IT – old fart.

[Peter Heggie]

I see a great future for it with continued enhancements. We have it and it is not yet rolled out for production use.

– We want our Operations staff to use it instead of having a separate, physical monitor for each site’s NetMonitor screen.

– We want to use the smat file search dialogs to be used by users to search for messages, especially during integration testing, which now is a big drain on our time with little benefit to us.

During Inforum, Charles Phillips gave a speech which included the slide/phrase “End the tyrany of the super user”. Thats what we want with being able to provide canned queries to users, using Global Monitor. This still needs work (can’t save the selection of smat files to search. Users will have no idea of which smat files to search).

We also like the customization capabilties where GM can be used to host home-grown Java apps that need a platform/environment that can host dialogs (have visual elements to the application).

Peter

Peter Heggie
PeterHeggie@crouse.org

[Tim Pancost]

We have had Global Monitor for years and have found it INVALUABLE for our operations staff to monitor our several-thousand-thread production environments.  Of particular note was the ability to monitor seven production machines from one user interface.

We just installed the newest version within the last couple of months, so have not had the opportunity to explore some of the newer functionality, particularly the SMAT search, but are quite excited about it.  It does, however, have implications with SMAT archival, we currently compress our archived SMAT files.

We are also in the process of opening up view-only access to some other teams within the organization to enable them to check the status of interfaces where they are responsible for the sending/receiving system without having to involve our Integration Team initially.  A lot of our time is spent telling these teams, “Yup, the interface is up and connected and not backed up.  You might want to check with your vendor on why you’re not seeing the message you’re looking for.”  This should help alleviate some of that.

TIM

Tim Pancost
Trinity Health

[Rob Abbott]

This is a great discussion.  I would be really interested to hear feedback on what enhancements you would like to see and what current features you feel aren’t working quite right.

Peter, in the latest GM you can on a thread in the “network monitor” view widget, and go to the SMAT file directly via the context menu.  That may help your users that aren’t sure what file(s) to search on.

ALso interested to hear any feedback on the message tracing feature.  We have some exciting enhancements planned for that – side-by-side message comparison for one!

Rob Abbott
Cloverleaf Emeritus

[Bob Richardson]

Greetings,

Just upgraded to GMX 6.1.0 on Windows 2008 server.

We have been using the Global Monitor application since March 2010 now.   A worthwhile investment:  our Data Center Operations staff monitor and respond to alerts.   The thread notes contain support information used by Operations (and us).

We have team members who are not Cloverleaf staff using the application and now feel empowered to stop/start interfaces and find/view SMAT messages.   Allows us to spend time on other pursuits.

We have submitted several enhancement/bug fixes at the INFOR website.

Notably a fix for HACMP (AIX unix) to refresh a host’s site list after a failback event.   That is pending.  

The application keeps improving.

Beats our old solution of a PC farm for each site running unsupported hcinetmonitor exes.

[Mike Strout]

Thanks Peter, Tim and Bob. I want to get our organization closer to where Bob is so we deal with the bigger issues of the day. It is a lot of money though. 🙁

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