Labsy

Hi, I am using PCM for some time and I am thinking of purchasing more licences. Some days ago I installed debugging app on one of my servers (Linux) and it reported two weird errors in pcmonitor.jar: 1.) NullPointerException in checkflick.data.entities.Movie Called by putMovie public String toString() { return "name: " + this.fullName + ". status: " + this.status.toString(); } 2.) ArithmeticException in checkflick.bidding.SimpleBidBroker Called by SimpleBidBroker def handlePricing(bid: CustomBiddingRequest) { val pricePerUnit = bid.getUnitCount / (bid.getPrice * 1) CustomBiddingRequest println("Price for request: " + bid.getRequest + " is: " + bid.getPrice) println("Price per unit is " + pricePerUnit) } What do those "Movie" and "Broker" stuff have to do with PCMonitor?

Hmmm....yes, that's true. But still my logic is to have server with RED color only for the time being unreachable. When it comes back online, I expect RED bubble should disappear from this server in main screen.

Well, back to the topic. This morning I woke up and found notifications for 3 servers to be offline! Even before I opened my eyes completely, I held internal panic inside and started investigation, even though my view was still blurry. But nothing... I found absolutely nothing wrong, all servers were up and running, no complaints from users, no other alarms. Hmmm....must be a glitch either in PCM agent, maybe some hiccup on internet connection.... ...but the fact at the moment when I looked at the screen of my mobile phone was, that at that particular moment servers were NOT OFFLINE ANYMORE. Well, for such cases I still think some "auto-update" feature might be built-in to PCM to automatically mark such a notifications as pase, maybe some other color, not red anymore. With other words, the color of notification might change depending on CURRENT item status - while elevated or critical state lasts, the appropriate color should be applied to notification. But when this state is over, also notification color should change. Too complicated? What do you think, guyz?

Hi Paul, I am particulary interested into monitoring multiple ESXi hosts. None of them have licence, all are free, so vCenter does not come into account. Will think about multiple PCM agents (I assume you need a licence for each of them, rite?)

Hi, is there an easy option to add managing for multiple virtualization hosts?

Paul, I see you are not just PCM fan, but a great contributor. So, btw....can you tell me about plugins, where to install them? On server...and android app will also be upgraded automatically to display/use the plugin feature? Or need to add plugin to android too?

Agree with Paul, that Remote Desktop would be actually usefull only in Windows Dashboard application, and not on phone or tablet. Although on bigger and bigger tablets coming onto market today, I guess it's a feature to be missed very soon. For Windows Desktop app...well, I am using already proven Remote Desktop solution Devolutions Remote Desktop Manager, which is free (with limited, but still very useful features). What's nice about that is it also includes VNC, HTTP and other types of connections, so if PCM will choose that path, my suggestions would be to include: - Windows RDC client - VNC client - open in browser (HTTP and HTTPS)

Paul, that's very good tip! As you guessed, it's about SBS servers. On "normal" topology I never allow Exchange to be installed on DC, but on SBS I don't have much choice. I've digged google a bit, but I cannot find where to change this timeout. Can you help?

Hmmm.... for example, if an average ping during busy hours is between 1 and 2 ms, then I set threshold to 5 ms in 5 minutes period. And that setting triggers a notification few times a day. Might it be due to ping collection method? For example, PCM may collect ping response in few different ways: - might issue system PING command and only read response from system - might have own PING module and ping from PCM directly - also there is a posibility that PCM only sends 1 ping in time intervals, which should be corrected to at least 2 or 3 pings each time

Excellent idea! I have service notification set to 3 minutes, but I'll change it to 10 and we.ll see. Thanx.

As I have a plan to controll ALL servers I manage, there would be over 100 different answers so, it depends...Windows servers are rebooted more often to apply patches, Linux server once a year. I noticed the above mentioned symptom on Windows server, but I cannot confirm it happens on all installations. The particular ones I observe took 7-10 minutes to shut down (Exchange servers)

Hi Paul, what you say is very true, so actually I reconsidered my request. But I do not have any good idea how to solve. What bothers me is a dozen of notifications on my android phone, most of them about PING and some about CPU, elevated. For example, I have 5 notifications about PING elevated for past 4 hours, but when I look at server there's nothing wrong. Even more - if I look at MRTG on that server, I cannot see any traffic congestions, no ping delays, which is weird. So I assume either PCM hicups and does not measure PING properly, or the issue was transient and poses no threat to server functionality. ...or at least but not last, I might be wrong and I have some hidden problems on server

Hi, when you shut down or reboot the server, you receive quite a lot of notifications about services going down. Is it possible to somehow detect that shutdown/reboot has been issued and suppress all notifications for monitored services until next start?

Hi, I have a lot of ping and cpu notifications, but I must read one by one to see, which one is still critical, and which is somehow resolved. So I suggest to have additional notification status, like "past" or something, which would be set for notification, where there is no alarm state anymore and the notification has not been read nor deleted. Server/PC status would not have red or yellow dot anymore for such statuses (meaning, at the moment I do not have to worry about server/PC) Thoughts?

Hi, on Android PCM it would be quite nice if you would implement a click-on notofication (critical or elevated) and it would go to the monitored feature, which is related to this notification. For example, I get notofication that service named "Windows blah blah service" is stopped, then I go back, scroll down to services, find that service...huh, I must remember name of the service, right? So It would be nice to just click-on that notification and the particular service page would pop up. What do you say?

Hi, excellent application, must say and we'll purchase it definitelly! One of the bugs I noticed is that PING sensor within application on Ubuntu 10.04 linux is much different from ping, issued via console. For example, PCmonitor reports ping alarm, because it it over 24 ms... ....but at the same time I was pinging the same target via console, getting latency times from 0,8 to 1,2 ms, not more. I assume PCmonitor ping uses some internal mechanism to ping, but it probably does some job at the same time, so it skips some replies. Or not. But the fact is, that (at least on Linux, tested on 2 different linux boxes) reported pings are not real.