Re: Pager/ notification system?

Jeffrey Silberberg wrote:
> 
>     Okay,
> 
>         I can not resist any longer on this issue, so my question to those
> in this discussion is, "Why buy software for this function ?".  If I can
> send e-mail  to pin@pagingservice.com, and the AS/400 has built in E-mail
> SMTP support, why buy a package that does little else but  dial a phone, in
> the case of those looking for simple implementations.
> 
>         Now I know that most of this software does much more, like
> escalation notification but is it overkill in most cases ?
> 
>         Jeff Silberberg,


Good question.  I guess it depends on how much you want it to do. 
Paging/e-mail is really the smallest part of the application. 

Some of the things we use our system to monitor for are :

* Active server Jobs.  If a particular server job goes down the system
will page & then attempt to restart the server if it is still down after
30 minutes.  
* Users signed on with SECADM privs
* Users who are signed on after their normal working hours (possible
hackers)
* Interactive jobs hogging CPU time (especially bad since we are on a
170)
* Jobs in MSGW or LCKW status
* Jobs with very poor interactive response times (query)
* Batch queues with held jobs or too many jobs
* ping routers & servers across our network
* backups & other jobs not started on time
* System value changes - tracks bad users and creates a nice log to
refer to.
* Subsystem/pool changes & startups
* critical system messages (disk utilization etc.)
* monitor for SNA, SDLC line failures
* sysopr messages such as file full - rather than set *nomax on our
files we set it up to automatically 
extend the file up to 15 times and page us.  That way if we have a file
that grew a lot faster than we thought the users don't see a problem but
we do.  But if the program is just gone amok it won't eat all the DASD.

Some messages are sent to pagers, some to e-mail, some to cell phone
pagers, some execute programs & some to MSGQ's of server programs. 

It's not just a question of sending a message when a job reaches a
certain step.  We use it more to manage the 400 than to send messages. 
One of the great strengths of the AS400 is its error handling via
messages.  And with this software if a message is created in QHST,
QSYSOPR etc. I can have the system automatically react to it.
Yes we could write programs to handle all of this but much cheaper to
buy. 

John Hall
Home Sales Co.
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