“Our organization doesn’t have a network operations center (NOC), so we’ve leveraged Sysgem as a sort of ‘virtual NOC’. Here are a few examples:
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From the network perspective, we ping the clients on a regular basis and report accordingly
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From a system security perspective, we report on potential system intrusions and report excessive password failures
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From an operational perspective, we set up rules to ensure that certain required batch jobs and/or detached processes are always present/running, and to restart them if they fail. We also report on stopped print queues. We have rules that scan for potential runaway processes or a high CPU load
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From a system hardware perspective, we have rules that monitor our shadowed disks, and report if there is a change in the status. We also monitor disk space, with alarms set for different thresholds on different disks
While we’ve had ‘watchdog jobs’ for some of those functions listed above, those only add more processes to our systems, where Sysgem only has one client process to do its work. Having a centralized reporting facility like Sysgem means I don’t have to spend a lot of time digging through log files (in the event of an error), etc. I just have to glance at the display for a real-time status.
By automating a lot of this monitoring (both for OpenVMS and Unix/Linux systems), each admin as freed up several hours per week, and we’ve eliminated the need for a dedicated operations employee.
Aside from freeing up a lot of my time, using Sysgem has really paid off in other ways as well. Instead of interrupting my workflow periodically to look for/investigate errors, error messages now come to me. That allows me a more uninterrupted and productive day. My boss likes that.”
Aerospace and defence industry ,USA
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“We are using the Audit Browser to keep track of the changes made in Sysgem Enterprise Manager for print queues. It provides us with all the information that we need. The NDC Sysgem developer was quick to provide a customized version of Sysgem when we requested it on short notice. We are very pleased with the product and the support we received during implementation phase.”
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Wholesale grocery distributor, USA​​​​
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“I use the Sysgem Explorer app every day to view text files, command files and log files. Down time in our plant costs $20k per hour or more, so the system performance alerts configured with Sysgem Enterprise Manager for are invaluable to us. Here’s where Sysgem pays for itself: ​
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High CPU usage — the alert lists the program with was taking the CPU time so we don’t have to guess. This has been extremely valuable in debugging applications and preventing downtime
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Disk drive failure — our disks are configured as RAID 1 so a single disk failure does not cause a problem. However, without the Sysgem System Manager alerts, we wouldn’t know a disk had failed, so the alert enables us to replace the failed disk quickly before a second drive failure would cause downtime
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RAID controller cache battery — this alert lets us know when the battery is not charging and needs to be replaced. This prevents possible data loss or corruption
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We also trend CPU usage and Oracle performance and can see how these change over time which can point to potential problems”
Steel Manufacturer, USA