February 7, 2012 Volume 7, Number 2   In This Issue...   February ELM Special! New ELM Build 148 Highlights January Curiosity Poll Results New Video Tutorials on ELM 6.5 February Curiosity Poll - Primary and Failover DB on Same System? ELM 411 - Your New Best Friend, Performance Alarms   100% Developed & Supported in the state of Washington, U.S.A.

February ELM Special - 20% off the New Core and Network Licenses We're excited to announce that during the entire month of February our new Core and Network Licenses are on sale for 20% off! This introductory offer is a great way to take advantage of the most popular monitoring features combined into these two new licenses introduced in ELM 6.5. Whether you are considering ELM for the first time or are a current client looking to upgrade or add-on to your existing installation, this is your chance to save big!      - Events, Performance, & More The Core License in ELM Enterprise Manager provides just the right balance of automated event log management along with the most commonly used server health and performance monitoring features. The Core license is designed to meet your "core" event log management and performance monitoring needs for Windows servers.    - Syslog, SNMP & More The Network License in ELM Enterprise Manager is designed specifically for network devices including firewalls, switches, routers and other devices. It is the perfect compliment to Windows event log and performance monitoring across your domains.   Don't wait - this is a limited time offer!

 New ELM Build 148 Highlights (Build "248" was announced in the Email version of the newsletter. We apologize for any confusion)

A new maintenance build of ELM Enterprise Manager 6.5 is now available for download. Updates and enhancements include:

• The ELM Server will start regardless of configuration load errors.
• Setting 'maxNumBackups' to 0 in DatabaseSettings.xml is respected.
• Event Alarms are more accurate.
• Notifications are now independent of Event View updates.
• Event Collection is more accurate when a single resource replicates event ids.
• ELM Advisor shuts down correctly.
• Memory leak in the ELM Server was resolved.
• ELM Editor Reports with a quote in the name strips the quote instead of failing.

Download the latest build of ELM Enterprise Manager to take advantage of these improvements today!   

 

Last month we asked about on-line videos, and how likely you are to view them when available for a product or service you are interested in. As of the publishing of this newsletter here's what respondents had to say:

How likely are you to view short on-line video overviews of a product or service you are interested in?

A fairly even split there with 59% inclined to view a video on-line while 41% are less likely to do so. Videos on-line are nothing new, however company policies and security restrictions on streaming media have become very common in some environments. We'll have to revisit this poll a year or so from now and see if opinions have changed at all.

 

We've been hard at work creating a new set of video tutorials to demonstrate the ease of setup, deployment, and using features in the newest version of ELM. Below you will find links to our "just released" tutorials that will help get you up to speed quickly.

Agent Deployment Wizard Step-by-Step Deploying Agents and Assigning Licenses Agent & Category Hierarchy Understanding the Agent and Category Hierarchy for System Monitoring Working with Event Views Overview of Event Views and Event Filters for Log Management

Archiving and Data Retention Setting up the Archive Database Single Agent Properties Finding Information on Individual Systems Custom Event Views Building Custom Event Views for Detailed Analysis

 February Curiosity Poll - Primary and Failover DB on the Same System?

ELM requires a SQL Server database for the primary and failover databases. Best practice is to have the primary database on one system, and the failover database on another system. The design methodology here is that if for some reason the primary becomes unavailable (machine goes down, network link broken, etc.) that ELM can swing over and utilize the failover database until the primary is available again. Although that's best practice, sometimes time or resources are limited. So we're wondering...

Are your ELM Primary and Failover Databases on the Same System?

 The "ELM 411" - Your New Best Friend, Performance Alarms

ELM Enterprise Manager includes a Performance Alarm out-of-the-box and enabled as one of the default monitor items on Core, System and Performance licenses. This watches for low disk space on all instances (drives) and will be triggered when less than 15% available is detected.

In previous versions of ELM, when the Performance Alarm was triggered, an Alert entry was created. Now that Alerts have been discontinued with ELM 6.5, the alarms create events that are visible in a new Event View named "ELM -- Monitor Item Events View". From here we could view performance issues or assign Notification Methods.

This default threshold in the Performance Alarm Monitor Item is a great starting point for general purposes or across multiple servers with common personalities, but what about those "problem children" we all seem to have? Having a disk free space threshold set at 15% could mean that the alarm is being triggered over and over again and we really don't want to know about it. For example, a couple of Exchange servers that are always running low on disk space by nature; we know this already, and really don't worry about it until a lower threshold has been met.

In a case like this we are better off to do a custom setup for a Performance Alarm. To get started we'll launch the New Monitor Item Wizard and select the Performance Alarm.

In the next step we're going to change the selected Counter from "% Free Space" to "Free Megabytes" so that we can set a specific value which for this example will be 700MB. We'll leave the asterisk (*) in place to monitor all instances, or if desired we could add specific instances to monitor. (Monitoring "_Total" is not very helpful when it comes to diskspace across multiple instances when one may be full while another is barely used.)

In the next step we'll leave enable Event Creation checked and we can then take a look at the Variables that can be included in this event message for more detail.

The Table below shows the details of each variable and their description.

Next we have the option to pick an agent to test the new Performance Alarm Monitor Item on which we'll skip. The next step is where we can choose an Agent Category to assign the Performance Alarm to. Rather than use this new Performance Alarm across servers in an existing category (where we don't want it on all of them) there are a couple options.

1) We could use the shortcut here to create a new Agent Category, then assign the Performance Alarm to it.

2) We could skip assigning to an Agent Category, then come back and assign the Performance Alarm one-by-one to specific Agents.

For our example, we used the "New" shortcut to create a new Agent Category and named it "Exchange Servers".

Next is to set the schedule for the Performance Alarm to run and we'll go ahead and change this to every 30 minutes.

And our final step -- and this is an important one so don't just skip through it -- is to give the new Performance Alarm a unique name and good description. This is important as you build up a library of these types of Performance Alarms you will want to be able to easily tell them apart without having to look at the properties of each one! (see below)

Now that we've established a Performance Alarm specifically for the disk free space on our Exchange Servers we can view any event activity in the "ELM -- Monitor Item Events View" shown earlier. To be notified of Performance Alarm issues the best approach is to create a new Event View specific to the Exchange Server category and Performance Alarm events and have our notification be based on that unique criteria. You would not want to assign a notification method to the "ELM -- Monitor Item Events View" itself as you would be getting the results of Ping, Service state changes and other less important information being sent.

The fastest way to create this new Event View is to right click on the Performance Alarm event, then choose "Create Event View." Walk through the steps for the new Event View wizard and you are off and running. (For help on setting up or assigning a Notification Method to an Event View, visit the ELM Help Files here.)

We hope that you found this article on Performance Alarms informative and wish you continued success with your ELM deployment!

NOTE: All ELM 411 articles are written based on ELM Enterprise Manager Version 6.5 and instructions may not be accurate for previous ELM Versions. If you would like assistance upgrading to ELM 6.5 so you can use these tips - please contact support@tntsoftware.com.

Share your own ELM tips!
Have a tip or trick with our ELM products you'd like to share with our newsletter subscribers? Send your ideas and any applicable screen shots to info@tntsoftware.com with "ELM 411" in the subject line. We'll take a look and if usable you'll see it published here in the ELM 411 section of upcoming newsletters!

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