Archive for August, 2008

Coming Soon: Failover Monitoring

Friday, August 29th, 2008

In any organization, making sure the servers are running is of critical importance and tools like Tembria Server Monitor are the workhorses that run the tests continuously and raise the alarm if something goes wrong.

But what if your monitoring server goes down?  There are a variety of reasons why this might happen ranging from hardware failures to plain old planned downtime for software upgrades.  During that period you don’t want to be left in the dark about potential problems.

We very happy to let you in on a great new feature that’s coming in the next release of Tembria Server Monitor:  Failover Monitoring.  With failover monitoring you’ll be able to install a secondary instance of Tembria Server Monitor that watches your primary and takes over all monitoring duties if the primary goes down.  Even better, the secondary server automatically synchronizes with the primary so you only need to maintain your configuration in one place.

Failover monitoring will be introduced in v5.3 which is due for release in mid-October.

Posted by Don

Posted in Server Monitor Features | No Comments »

Growing Pains for v5.2

Tuesday, August 19th, 2008

Version 5.2 has been out for a while now and as you’ve probably noticed we’ve issued a number of updates since the initial release.  We’re doing our best to provide rapid response for all reported issues and you can expect to see a few more updates over the coming weeks as we find and fix any remaining issues.

There are two reasons why this release has been a bit more rocky than our previous ones have been and we thought you might like to know a bit more about them.

First, version 5.2 includes a completely new monitoring engine that was rewritten from scratch.  The result?  A tremendous boost in monitoring performance.  Many more operations can run in parallel now and an intelligent schedule keeps them all straight.  Another result?  Some bugs…   We identified some issues with dependency checking, some issues with event monitors that need to save their settings and a number of other things.  Fixes for those are included in the current release.

Second, version 5.2 includes an integrated web server.  The result? Having an integrated web server makes it super easy for new users to get up and running with Tembria Server Monitor.  Since we thrive on the “try before you buy” model, this is a good thing for us.  Another result?  Some more bugs…  We had to make changes to pretty much every page in the web console in order to support running both on IIS and on the integrated web server.   We’ve caught almost all of these issues as of v5.2.3 but there are a few more that are fixed in v5.2.4 which will be released shortly.

Our thanks go out to everyone who has been so kind to report issues they’ve encountered and so patient while we work to fix them.

Posted by Don

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Changes to Patching Strategy

Monday, August 11th, 2008

Until now when issues were reported we typically would develop a patch and make the patch files available on our web site.  The trouble we’ve encountered is that we’ll often go through several patches and it becomes confusing to users who can’t tell which patches have already been installed and which ones they need to get.

On the other hand, we didn’t want to issue a new release for each bug that we find and fix.  We do our best to provide lightning fast fixes for reported issues and we’d be up to v5.2.10000 in no time at all if we did that.

So after some discussion, we’ve settled on a new plan.  When we have fixes for a reported issue we’ll publish them on our prereleases web site and inform everyone who got in touch to report them.  As usual each setup will include a distinct build number so you’ll know which version you have and be able to compare it easily to the version you have.  Once we’ve confirmed fixes for reported issues we’ll then make an official release which we’ll make generally available.

So if you run into something and it looks like a bug, let us know because we want to find and fix it as soon as possible.

Posted by Tim

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »