RSS feed

•  Subscribe to RSS feed
  
  All RSS readers will get a 20% discount as soon as we release Server Supervisor. The most valuable contributors will be granted with a free license.
  
  

• Recently Written

  • Demo version
  • Types of reports and their usage
  • What key principles we applied to user interface
  • What can you monitor and how to configure notifications
  • Introduction

• Categories

  • General
  • Monitoring
  • Reports
  • User Interface

• DEMO softlogica.vpscustomer.com Use "admin" as the login name and leave the password field blank.

• Archives

  • March 2008
  • February 2008

• Blogroll

  • SoftLogica
  • Web Load and Stress Testing

Search

Subscribe by E-mail

• Enter your email address:
  

In the previous posts I wrote about main features of the Server Supervisor product and even published couple screen shots to give you an idea of what it looks like in practice. Of course, any descriptions and still pictures do not provide same impression as an experience with a really working product. That is why from the very beginning we planned to provide access to a demo version of the product for everyone interested. The time has come. We have a version to show:

https://softlogica.vpscustomer.com
(use “admin” as the login name and leave the password field blank)

As usual I have to say that what you can see there is a kind of incomplete version. Some features may not work. I will not give you a list of them, because it can become obsolete in a week. We are going to update that demo version as we move on with the development of the product, so you can check for changes from time to time.

We had to add couple “safety features” to that demo, because we made it publicly available. Minimum polling interval for all monitors is 60 seconds. This means that you can’t check resources too frequently. Another limitation is that you can’t edit properties of the “admin” account. However you can create new accounts, if you want.

Since all users login to the same instance of the system, they all will share same configuration of monitors. If you would like to have your own separate instance, please leave a comment, and we will set up it for you.

Any comments, suggestions and bug reports are very welcome.

Leave a Comment

We believe that proper management of network resources is not just a matter of quick resolution of various urgent problems. A responsible system administrator should apply proactive practices to predict any faults and avoid them.

In many cases problems have roots that can be seen long before the actual fault. For example, if you experience a constant growth of number of customers visiting your web site, one day you will probably notice 100% CPU usage on your web site or data base system and will need to do an urgent hardware upgrade. If you could take a look at the CPU load parameter from time to time and noticed that it was growing constantly, you would probably prepare for that upgrade in advance.

So, in general the problem is that when you design your monitoring system by specifying various monitors, warning and error levels, notifications, etc., you can take in account only some simple fault situations. There are many situations and tendencies that can not be treated as faults and that are hard to specify in terms of warning levels. Yet, the proper examining of them can allow you to predict the tendencies of the overall system development and possible problems.

The users of Server Supervisor can perform such periodic examination using reports. The product provides the following types of reports:

• Simple monitor statistics. This report shows the values of a selected monitor during any specified period of time. You can also choose the scale to get more or less details.
• Resource uptime percentage. For a specified time period it shows the percentage of time the selected monitor was in each state.
• Summary by week days and hours. With this type of report you can get average statistics for particular days of week or day hours. For example, you know that your web system experiences highest load on weekdays around 4:00 PM. You can create report for last 5 days for the period between 3:00 PM and 5:00 PM to see the average values of CPU load monitor.
• Group reports. Resource uptime and summary reports can be created for groups of monitors.

We thought about many other types of reports that could be useful in various specific conditions. Finally we decided to start with a few types mentioned above and wait for a feedback from our users. Of course, we tried to design the whole system in a way that would allow us to add more types of reports easily. So, your suggestions are very welcome.

You can specify parameters of reports that you want to receive periodically and Server Supervisor will send these reports to you by email at the specified date and time. For example, you can configure it to send daily reports for a group of monitors for your web site every day at 9:00 AM. This way you will receive the information about last 24 hours every morning.

Leave a Comment

When you create a new product, one of the most important problems is how to design a good user interface. In many cases the solution of this problem becomes a key factor in the overall product success or failure.

The experience shows that it is hardly possible to design an “ideal” user interface that would be most convenient for all possible tasks the users will want to perform with help of the product. Therefore you should probably concentrate on the most common use cases. If we imagine an average user and try to measure all the time he or she uses a product and then try to classify that time by different use cases, we will find out that 90% of that time is covered by several major ones. So, the goal is to create such interface that would be optimal for these major use cases. That is what we tried to do.

We think that in our case these use cases are:

• Quickly get an overview of all the resources to identify possible problems.
• Analyze various parameters of the monitored resources over any selected time period in order to investigate the source of the problem.
• Check that everything is working fine once the problem is resolved.

We also had some general requirements for the user interface. It should have been designed to be accessible remotely via web to let users check and configure anything from any location. We also wanted it to be fast, easy-to-use, and good-looking (after all, we were going to sell the product, so we wanted to provide really good impression on people). That is why we chose Flash technology.

The screen shot below shows how it is organized in general.

You can switch between several tabs using the buttons on the left of the window. The most important tab is where you can see all the monitors. They are gathered to groups, so that it would be more convenient to manage them. For example, you can group monitors related to the same server. Visually each group can be expanded or collapsed.

Each entry in the list of monitors shows basic parameters of that monitor and the statistics for the last 24 hours in form of a bar painted in green, yellow and red (like a small colored graph).

You can select a monitor in the list and see more detailed statistics for it in the right view. This will let you perform deeper analysis. You can select different time periods and get any information that is required to analyze the work of that monitor.

At the top of the window there is a consolidated view that shows very basic parameters of the whole monitoring system, including the current number of monitors in each of three states and 24 hours history for all monitors.

We believe that such approach provides a view of all the monitored resources in a comprehensive form and at the same time lets users quickly get to any level of details.

Leave a Comment

Next Page →