* Inside-view tools
One of my biggest complaints about service software is that they often don’t give you much in the way of an “inside” view of real-time conditions. For example, I have tested many mail servers and none of them can give me a snapshot of what messages are currently coming and going in a simple and easily understood format. Sure, I can dig through logs and reconstruct what’s going on but that seems to me to be much harder than it should be. And making it easy is what really matters particularly when you’re troubleshooting.
A product in this category of inside-view tools that I really like the look of is from Quest Software (see editorial links below). Called Spotlight on Web Servers, the product provides a control panel that graphs the parameters of a Web server’s operations and manages alerts when exception conditions are encountered.
Written in Java, Spotlight on Web Servers displays the actual processing architecture of Web server traffic and transaction activities. Graphical diagrams of data flows show the rates at which data is moving between server components under the various Web servers including Microsoft IIS and Apache as well as the supporting Internet services including as FTP, Telnet and JDBC on those platforms.
Running on a PC with Windows NT4.0/2000, Spotlight on Web Servers uses what the company describes as an “agentless architecture” – it requires no server-side agent software. This reduces compatibility issues without, they claim, impacting server performance.
An area where this product excels is in its GUI – it presents a significant amount of technical information in a presentation loaded with icons, graphs, and gauges that make it easy to grasp the essentials of a server’s operation and spot the problem areas.
Spotlight on Web Servers can also display summarized metrics for a Web server cluster allowing you to monitor overall cluster statistics such as the average CPU utilization of cluster servers, the total number of users connected to the cluster, the number connected to each server, etc.
Finally, Spotlight on Web Servers can record and playback performance metrics for later diagnosis and you can have recordings started automatically by events such as CPU loading exceeding a specified threshold.
The product can report on Microsoft IIS 4.0/5.0 on Windows/NT and Windows 2000; NES 3.62+ and iPlanet 4.0/4.1/6.0 on Windows NT/2000, IBM AIX, HP-UX, Solaris and Linux; and Apache 1.3/2.0 on Windows NT/2000, IBM AIX, HP-UX, Solaris and Linux.
Spotlight on Web Servers is priced at $945.
