Gibu’s Blog

IBM announces DB2 will have a free edition . MS SQL and Oracle already give one.

Some of the limitations for the above free editions:

The Oracle version: . It can only run servers with one processor, with 4GB of disk space and 1GB of memory

IBM DB2 : It can be deployed on systems with two processor cores or up to two dual-core chips on Advanced Micro Devices- or Intel-based servers. The memory limit is 4GB but there are no limits on the size of database or number of users.

It will be interesting to know how many will actually go for these free editions instead of the other OSS options.

Our Team will be here blogs.appmanager.com to enlighten you

Today’s Unrelated Note

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Shin: A device for finding furniture in the dark.

2006 Welcome! Hope your new year will be splendid.

Today, Shan of our Sales team had a question from one of our prospective customers who was interested in using a whole bunch of our ManageEngine products, namely ManageEngine OpManager, ServiceDesk, Netflow Analyser, EventLog Analyser, Firewall Analyser, Applications Manager… woof. Well if you never thought it was possible to use all of these in one enterprise, then that’s fyi too

The customer wanted to know can I make sure all these are running fine. Do you have any mechanism for that. Well you can do that using the flexibility given by Applications Manager (AM)

You could use the simple web sequence recorder tool run through 5-10 web pages on each product, upload this sequence into Applications Manager. Then let AM run this test every 10 minutes and ensure that everything is fine. Any problems, get emailed…

You may also want to monitor the server and the database used by these applications, which is possible too. Add to it the reports provided that could help you in your compliance requirements.

that’s it for now…

Today’s Unrelated Note
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Trouble working from home with your emails and documents stuck in the office network ? Tell your sysadmin you need a Virtual Office.

What’s the big deal about being an agentless monitoring solution? Well one our customers said it very well in a recent conversation I had with him. Simply put, you do not need to hire extra personnel to maintain agents for your monitoring solution itself! And you still get what you need.

I agree with this observation. Users buy the software so that they can reduce IT personnel too, in the first plac Many of the big & expensive monitoring solutions insist on being agent based and that could be a big no-no for SMBs especially those who are not only cost conscious but also ‘number of people needed to maintain’ conscious too.

With more applications being built with management capabilities in mind, it is time Application Management vendors encourage an agentless world whereever it is possible. But this is definitely very hard for generationPrev who find it very hard to replace their existing solutions.

There is always the exception when you need an agent. Example to support older versions of software or when you solve some very specific problems. But from an end user perspective, an agentless world is the best !

Today’s Unrelated Note
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Planning for the new year? You may want to try out our web 2.0 service Zoho Planner

Some of the Applications Manager customers prefer to get a single alert when a server and all monitors on the server are down. That means, when my server itself is down, donot send me server + no. of monitors being monitored on the server number of down alerts. This could be annoying especially when you get sms alerts.

What you can do to workaround this is to create a monitor group and configure alert escalation only for availability at the monitor group level. Hence when any monitor(s) in that group is down, you get an alert saying the group is critical.

A lesser know feature is present here where you can use this to suppress alerts across servers, especially in a clustered setup. You can even configure availability alerts such that only if atleast 2 monitors are down, notify me. We are looking to improve that, hence we would love to hear from you…

Today’s Unrelated Note

A quote by Mother Teresa - “Peace begins with a smile.”

Hope the whole world starts smiling in year 2006.

In an earlier blog I mentioned how Web transactions could be recorded and played back. There is another interesting feature added in AM. It helps you analyse the performance of real transactions and also gives a break up of the performance of various components in a J2EE environment.

We could figure out some of the performance bottlenecks of the Applications Manager Web Client itself with this feature

What you get is what Java methods take more time to execute, which sql takes more time to execute etc. Imagine being empowered with a profiler tool to monitor production applications …..

Today’s Unrelated Note :

If you want to edit and share documents online check out our new service zohowriter.com

BEA JRockit JVM has some new features that could help tune Java applications. With JRockit Mission Control tracing in production applications is possible with least overhead on the application. It even talks of being able to turn off completely all overhead on the application at runtime caused due to this monitoring. So not much of heisenberg effect worries.

What does Sun JDK 1.5 users have for tracing in-production applications ? Well you can find out soon in my next blog

By the way in our Christmas Release, we have added support for WebLogic 9.

……

We had a nice user contributed script from Jeff of Pobox.com. The PHP script when executed sends by email the details of what each thread of MySQL is doing at that point of time.

This is very encouraging for us. We love seeing customers tweaking and playing around with the flexibility provided by Applications Manager and coming out with innovative usage.

Thanks Jeff. Others who want to contribute and benefit, we will come out with a User Script contributions section soon.

In the meantime please create a new topic and post it in our User Forums

Will keep you updated on this here.

Also, by the way if you feel there is something else we could do to provide even more flexibility, do post here or mail us.

Wondering what’s cooking in Applications Manager (AM) front?

Well those who run both Microsoft .NET and J2EE app servers have something to cheer about ! In the next service pack of AM just a week away, you should be able to monitor both from a single console. Last weekend the team had a tough time getting through QC.

Well this is not just it. There’s something else too. Will get back on that later.

I know you can’t wait to get your hands on it

Cheers ….

Last week I had to find out some scalability stats of Applications Manager (AM). My main concern was to find out whether the database or the Java application was the bottleneck.

The application to be tested was running on RH Linux and the applications being monitored were setup on a Solaris 5.8 with 150 Virtual IPs. I will not be going into the scalability stats itself of AM here, but more on how I calculated certain performance metrics.

I restricted myself to just 5 performance metrics :

1) CPU Utilization of the server

2) Request Processing rate of the database. Here MySQL

3) Data transfer rate of the database

4) Memory Utilization of the Java Application

5) Response Time of the Application’s Web Client

Now how did I get the above stats? Well, I used another AM to do that for me.

The reporting helped me as it gives the hourly average as graphs too.

For the perf stats, i used various monitors marked in ():

1) CPU Utilization of the server - (Linux Montoring)

2) Request Processing rate of the database. Here MySQL - (MySQL DB Monitoring)

3) Data transfer rate of the database. (MySQL DB monitoring)

4) Memory Utilization of the Java Application - App Manager has a (tomcat)

5) Response Time of the Application’s Web Client - Used (URL Sequence) Monitoring

Hence if you need to test your application’s performance even before going into production, you may want to use Applications Manager - It has a Free Edition too!

AM being more of a data collection and processing application, i did not try out user load testing. But Web 2.0 applications may even want to simulate load on your web application using QEngine and see how ‘N’ simulataneous users impacts the backend and Java application.

Good luck!