New Barbarian TechnologiesNew Barbarian TechnologiesOur SMS Watcher Series
It's ironic yet reasonable - SMS requires management like anything else. There are lots of tools that you can actually use to do the management of SMS, but the trick is to know when to use them, since you're busy with other things and don't want to spend a lot of time figuring out what needs help, and you certainly don't want to wait for complaints. Thus we offer the following programs. You could think of them as tools to help manage the tool you use to manage your systems
- SMS Jobs Watcher - how are the jobs coming along? are the users running them? etc...
- SMS SQL Watcher - are the databases full? are the SQL Server services up?
- SMS Packages Watcher - are the packages where they should be?
- SMS Inventory Watcher - is everybody reasonably up to date?
- SMS Services Watcher - are all the SMS services up?
Future Possibilities (in approximate priority order):
- SMS Files Watcher - this will mostly be a performance indicator, but if the flow stops it will be another indicator of what needs help
- SMS Disks Watcher - is there enough disk space on the site server disks (for despooling, etc.)? How about on the distribution servers? A regular SMS report might do this a lot easier, but it would be tricky (if not impossible) to report on just disks that are used for SMS. So walking the SMS heirarchy and the appropriate registry entries might be better - we've done that with the other programs, so one more time would be pretty easy
- SMS Senders Watcher - are the bandwidth limitations and schedules set properly? are things getting through? how fast and when?
- SMS Version Watcher - this will be good during SMS upgrades - whose got it? clients and servers
- SMS Events Watcher - let's see the good new ones - then again, maybe regular reports are sufficient for this
- SMS SharedApps Watcher - are the right users all getting the right applications?
- SMS SNMP Watcher - what are we watching with SNMP and where? are we getting anything good in or out?
- SMS Client Watcher - this would be especially easy for NT clients, but doing it enterprise-wide would not be easy. The idea would be to ensure all clients are ready to be remote controlled
- and SMS version 2.0 features will give more possibilities
With so many possibilites, it will eventually get messy to use our series of watcher tools. The logical conclusion would be to merge them into one large but easy to use tool. It would have facilities to alert you of significant situations, and the most useful stuff would be easy to access. Even as it is, the current programs need polishing and extensions. So there's lots of work to do. Maybe someday we'll figure out a way to finance this, or maybe we'll sell the rights to the ideas to someone, and they can do it.
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