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Monitoring the Big Picture: Page 5 of 6

The system comes with three configurable user levels, one of which is read-only. The levels let users acknowledge alarms, view agent status and manage reports, as well as perform other tasks that can be combined and assigned by the administrator to provide the granularity of access deemed appropriate.

Finding the Source

The Diagnostics Wizard lets clients capture relevant data from a device to identify the source of a problem. The wizard comes with a suite of out-of-the-box diagnostics that have been expanded to include top 10 EJB (Enterprise Java Beans) for WebSphere, top 10 servlets for WebSphere, top 10 processes by CPU for AIX and Linux, a Logfile Dump mechanism, and ActiveSocket Dump and Execute (WebLogic).

ProactiveNet's new Domain Knowledge Capture links the user to a description of, and special instructions regarding, a problem on the network. I used this to create a link from an expected alarm that would occur during planned outages of servers and network devices. That way, whoever receives this alarm in the future will see that the service failures were identified properly, and will have instant access to any necessary corrections.

Overall, this release brings organizations a tool that, with a little tuning, can provide production monitoring of a network and everything that relies on it.