With a certain amount of exhaustion we are very pleased to announce the release of Tembria Server Monitor v5.5! This new release includes a wealth of new monitoring features all tucked into our existing user interface.
One of our most technically challenging updates in v5.5 is pretty much invisible but important nonetheless: We rewrote our monitoring engine to introduce a lot more parallelism and allow it to scale to much larger installations. We’ve come a long way since v1.0 was released in 2003. It was a desktop utility that could monitor about 25 machines on the local subnet. We’re now rolling out deployments for environments with 2500+ devices to monitor and running tests in environments that simulate 5000+ systems under active monitoring. We modestly believe that pretty good for a product like our Enterprise Edition at a modest price of $1995 USD.
Most of the other changes in v5.5 are more obvious and I’d like to highlight a few of the ones that have been the big hits with our beta testers and we think you’ll greatly benefit from them too.
Our new logbook functionality is not obvious at first glance but most people who start to use it quickly find that it has huge benefit. We’ll be writing more about this in a separate post but here is a quick overview: Let’s say Tembria Server Monitor sends you an alert telling you that the H: drive on a file server is approaching capacity. Naturally, you investigate and you find that a user has dumped a pile of personal data onto a share that is supposed to be only for corporate data. So you back it up, clear it out and inform the user.
You’ve been alerted to a problem and have taken corrective action. Tembria Server Monitor v5.5 now lets you close the loop. You select the event history option to add a log book entry. Then you enter details about what occurred and what action you took. Over time you’ll build up a great history of all the administrative actions you took in order to keep things running smoothly.
Other new features in v5.5 include a new System Restart event monitor that alerts you about restart events while distinguishing between planned and unplanned restarts and even providing the reason text entered by administrators. Our SNMP Trap event monitor implements caching allowing it to better handle floods of traps, which is the way traps tend to arrive of course. A new SSH/Linux event monitor lets you run any command you choose on remote systems support SSH and includes sophisticated parsing options to let you make sense of command results and generate the appropriate notifications. New notification types give you more control over when you receive notifications and how many you receive for ongoing error conditions.
And there’s a lot more than that. It’s all covered in our version history and we encourage you to take peek before upgrading.
We would like to express our thanks to everyone who participated in the beta testing of v5.5. With your help we were able to track down and fix many issues and your comments and suggestions were very much appreciated and very valuable to us.
Posted by Don