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New Server Monitoring Case Study Available Results of Last Month's 32-bit and 64-bit Curiosity Poll Microsoft Exchange Curiosity Poll |
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New Server Monitoring Case Study
The following is an excerpt from our newly published case study: "Vancouver Radiologists Centralizes Event Log Archiving and Performance Monitoring with ELM"Vancouver Radiologists, P.C. is an ACR accredited facility providing a full-spectrum of professional diagnostic imaging services to the residents of the greater Vancouver, WA and Portland, OR area for over 36 years.
The IT Department at Vancouver Radiologists manages the IT infrastructure across 5 facilities encompassing approximately 100 workstations, 30 servers, and numerous medical devices. With only two Network Administrators and a Health Information & Technology Director they rely heavily on their ability to quickly and proactively respond to issues. Any downtime greatly interferes with the high volume of patient studies they receive daily.
It is extremely difficult to manage numerous servers efficiently and effectively without the proper tools. Manually checking all event logs, as well as saving log files, and archiving is a daunting task. Without an automated system, a full-time employee could be dedicated to these routine and redundant tasks. For Vancouver Radiologists and many other companies, this is the reason that a server management solution is so valuable.
Read the rest of the case study here...
Results of Last Month's 32-bit and 64-bit Curiosity Poll
In last month's newsletter we asked: Are you running mostly 32-bit or mostly 64-bit applications in your production environment? And as of the publishing of this newsletter here's what you said:
"Although 64-bit is coming in, 32-bit apps still rule"
The majority of respondents to this survey are still running primarily 32-bit applications. Even though 64-bit hardware has been around for a while, 64-bit applications are just not that mainstream yet.Want to see who voted where?
Click on the link below for a state by state comparison response map.
Microsoft Exchange Curiosity Poll: What version of Microsoft Exchange does your company use?
Microsoft Exchange has become one of the world's most popular business messaging software platforms, but we're still wondering: What version of Microsoft Exchange does your company use?
Officially released on September 16, 2005, ELM Enterprise Manager 4.0, ELM Log Manager 4.0, and ELM Performance Manager 4.0 have supported hundreds of clients who manage thousands of systems worldwide. Product enhancements and upgrades have provided these users great value and most have already migrated to either ELM 5.0 or ELM 5.5. As a result, we are announcing the termination of commercial and technical support of all three ELM 4.0 products effective December 31, 2009 in accordance with our product lifecycle policy. The upgrade license is available free of charge for all users with current Premier Support.
The "ELM 411" - Who is the chattiest of them all
In this month's ELM 411 technical article we'll show you how to answer some of those basic questions that you've certainly wondered about. Who, or better what, servers on your network are the chattiest/noisiest/busiest?
Have you ever had to try and figure out which servers on your network produce the most events?
How many events do they produce on a monthly basis?
How about weekly?
Daily?
How many events per minute?
Often overlooked in the custom reporting engine ELM Editor is a sample report folder called Event Summary. This set of reports offers a breakdown of event activity by computer, by source and by type.
To access this set of sample reports, open the ELM Console and expand the Results container.
Then drop down and expand the Reporting container.
Next is the ELM Editor folder and Sample Custom Reports.
Within Health & Performance there is a folder called Event Summary.
Here you'll see the sample report options for events by computer, source or even type.
The Events by Computer report provides quick answers these questions that may have been plaguing you. The first section of the report shows a count of event types by computer as well as totals.
The next data grid shows Event Count Statistics by month, week, day, even by the minute. (Note, if the volume of events is low enough to produce a calculation of less than one event per minute the report shows a zero instead of a partial event count.)
As you can see from these first two data grid reports some systems are much chattier/busier generating events than others. For example TNTB2 is the noisiest of this group. Why's that? It is a domain controller here in our test lab. On the other hand Suprano is extremely quiet.
On the Events by Source report you can view a graphical representation of the volume of events coming from your top event producing sources.
On the Events by Type report you can view a more rolled up summary report of the event activity on your systems whether those be Success, Informationals, Errors or Warnings.
All reports in ELM Editor are customizable so you can change date ranges and create any variation of charts and data grids you'd like. For more details check out the Custom Reports with ELM Editor tutorial.
It is common for ELM users to see security audit success events comprising the lion's share of data. If you have audit compliance requirements, then your decisions are simple: you're obligated to store this data. However your data management task becomes somewhat more difficult. ELM Enterprise Manager can help with this via archive databases, Performance Alarms for free disk space, and SQL Monitor queries for SQL internals.
If you are not obligated to retain all this data, then you have more flexibility in your decisions and can ease your data management burden with a little planning. ELM can help with this by excluding events from the database through the Event Collector Exclude Filters. This can be planned ahead of time or done on-the-fly as incremental corrections to your overall monitoring.
We hope that you found this article informative and wish you continued success with your ELM deployment!
NOTE: All ELM 411 articles are written based on ELM Version 5.5 and instructions may not be accurate for previous ELM Versions. If you would like assistance upgrading to ELM 5.5 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!
Our name may have "TNT" in it, but we're really not explosive. Really...
It's an interesting story behind the name TNT Software. We didn't start out producing fireworks and somehow migrate into computer programming or anything like that. Although in years past we've been called on to find out what kind of fireworks we offer.TNT Software actually started out as Taylor Made Software. Steve Taylor, founder of the company, had planned to follow in his father's footsteps with the name of his company. Steve's dad owned and operated Taylor Made Wood Products so it was a natural fit to pursue this naming convention.
However, Taylor Made golf products thought that there was enough confusion between the names that they had their attorneys draft a letter to Taylor Made Software asking them to consider a name change. Although not necessary, Steve decided to seek out a different and more descriptive name for the company.
At the time "PC Software" was a buzzword in the computer industry. However, Steve liked the idea of a company name that would also represent the locality of the company. "Pacific Crest Software" became a possibility as the company is located in the Pacific Crest region and the abbreviation would be quite fitting with the buzzword(s) of the day. Pacific Crest Software - PC Software. Unfortunately someone else thought this was a great idea as well as Pacific Crest Software company already existed.
Another up and coming mainstream technology of the time was Windows NT, commonly referred to just as "NT" (Windows NT 4.0 was officially released in July 1996). Since Steve founded the company together with his wife, Taylor and Taylor or TNT Software had a very nice ring to it in association with Windows NT. But Steve did have a few reservations about locking down that name.
"Well there was some concern about a software company being associated with things that blow up," laughs Steve. "Our products monitor and report on the health and status of systems and we didn't want a negative connotation that we are known for blowing them up or causing crashes." Steve went on to add, "We've always been tempted to use an explosive or fireworks themed approach with our product marketing but we've never been able to get over that potentially negative kickback." But the name stuck.
As for the connection to Windows NT, "Who knew that it would only be around for a couple releases before Microsoft would change the name! The core NT technology was really the pioneer of today's powerful operating systems and distributed networks. I'm still happy to have that sort of an association to our company name," says Steve, "and no, we don't sell bottle rockets but I do love fireworks. The bigger the better!"
For more information about TNT Software's history, visit the company section of our website.
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