Working in a very wet Nice with GSX this week.  Version 10 of Monitor/Analyser is out very soon (read: days from now).  Some lovely enhancements to the 9.x build and some brand new features make it a very compelling toolset for a Messaging, application or mobile monitoring company.  Some points to note about the new release.

Modular installation.  Pick the items you want to monitor.  These now include:

This one tool now monitors all these products.  Dedicated interfaces, dashboards and immediate access to data plus proactive notification of issues.  These are pretty deep dive features tool, including the full-fat Sametime 8.5 monitoring and Exchange cluster monitoring to name but two.

The overall GSX Monitor UI has improved and been (gasp) modernised to look like it belongs in this century.  Not this decade mind you, but at least it is improved.

The Flex-based GSX Analyser has been improved again, permitting more customisation on reports.  For those that don’t know, Analyser will take all the statistics from Monitor, output them on a very pretty, flexible web-based UI, or email you statistics in a customisable pdf on a set schedule.  If you are an administrator, you want this.   It does a lot of work for you and makes you look very good.

Lotus Traveler monitoring

The Traveler module is particularly interesting to me.  Server side, servlet side, http and device activity with alerts for issues.  Reporting is also available through Analyser.  As you can see, GSX are working on matching their BES monitoring interface (not as much detail for obvious reasons).

Along with these (and many more) large scale improvements, there are many minor adjustments including maintenance mode (downtime) monitoring and scheduling tasks.  The GSX toolset (and the staff) have always impressed me.  I never took to the monitor UI, but it has improved.  The analyser tool however , is stunning.

This is a very powerful tool with great depth.  If you are in an operational role, you should take a look.

An article I wrote about prevention of
system downtime from a high level has been published on the GSX
blog site.  You can download
it here.

OK, I’m no Duffbert,
and pretty much sure that being
syndicated on the New York Times
is an accolade that I will never be able to announce (Incredibly good work
Duff btw), but consider this document a high-level look at "why"
you should monitor your environment, taking into consideration current
economic conditions and the fact that many people have changed employer
without changing desk in the past few months.  A nod goes to Bill
in the document also, as the underlying factor in the worst practices presentation
of "prevention is better then cure" guided me in its writing.

GSX have setup their own blog
for their team.  Hopefully,
it will contain some good stuff on their monitoring software and product
development.  Admin people may want to add it to their RSS feeds.

The guys from GSX
impress me.  They know their
trade, and know it very well.  Uncompromising software, and very professional
presentations.  When asked last week at the conference if they supported
iPhone browser… they didn’t say yes, they gave a url… cocky… I just
tested it.  It works on WMD, iPhone, and a berry… impressive.  A
clean dashboard interface, whilst on the move, giving you status information
of your servers.