Archive for August, 2009

Version 5.5 Beta Updated

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

We released an update to our v5.5 beta today.  Build 2014 includes a variety of fixes as well as new features. Th setup program has been updated and now you can provide credentials to access the master monitoring node without having to edit the config.ini file.  Also, the master monitoring node can now run through IIS on HTTPS with a standard certificate or a self-signed one.  This is our recommended configuration since by using HTTPS all communication is secured from your remote monitoring nodes to your master node.  In some situation you can continue to use our integrated web server, such as when communications are already going over an encrypted VPN link.

New features in build 2014 include a new System Restart Event Monitor that watches for planned and unplanned system restarts and provides details and reason codes.  It’s a great way to stay on top of system status and be alerted about critical events such as failing hardware or bad drivers that lead to a restart with a STOP code.  We’ve also added new options to the File Event Monitor, new tokens for notification templates and many other changes under the hood.

Posted by Don

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SQL Export Options

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

The Enterprise Edition of Tembria Server Monitor includes an option to export all the data points it collects to a SQL Server database.  It’s a great way to keep a long term archival of your monitoring data and potentially integrate it with other systems and datawarehouse elements.

There are a couple of steps you need to take to prepare the database to receive the data from Tembria Server Monitor.  The complete set of instructions are available in this post in our support forums:

http://www.tembria.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=93&highlight=sql

We recently made a change to the recommended table definition.  In particular we now recommend using varchar(256)  for the dpname column.  We were seeing some cases where bandwidth event monitors were generating datapoints with long names because the network adapter has a long name (e.g “Atheros AR8121/AR8113/AR8114 PCI-E Ethernet Controller”) and these were exceeding the column size that we used to recommend.  If you get an error saying “The statement has been terminated” then just open up the SQL Enterprise Manager, navigate to the datapoints table, right-click on it and choose Design Table.  Then set the dpname column to varchar(256) and save the change.  All of the existing data will be preserved but it may take a couple of minutes for SQL Server to apply the change.

Posted by Don

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Coming Soon: System Restart Event Monitor

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

In Tembria Server Monitor v5.5 we’re introducing a new System Restart Event Monitor.  This event monitor watches for planned and unplanned events and reports on reason codes and reason text too.  It’s a great way to get access useful tidbits of information that are provided by Windows when a system is restarted.  For example, if one of your systems is suffering from failing hardware or a bad driver and Windows forces a blue screen STOP and restart, Tembria Server Monitor will detect it and provide the STOP code in the notification.

System Restart Event Monitor

System Restart Event Monitor

All kinds of other details can be picked up.  For example, if you restart a virtual machine in Hyper-V the restart notification tells you that it was a Hyper-V user that initiated the shutdown.  For planned shutdowns Windows prompts the user for reason text and we include that in the notification too.  And lastly, when Windows boots from an unplanned restart, the first person to log into the console is prompted to provide some text explaining the restart (”Oops, touched the restart button”) and Tembria Server Monitor will detect that too and issue a notification.

Posted by Jason

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