System Status - how would you improve it?

[Michael_Bilsbor]

Hi, Hopefully by now most of you are seeing the System Status feature we introduced into V8 sp4 and are finding it useful. I would like to get you opinions on how you feel about it and how we can improve it further. So in terms of usability, you find it ok, at the right level? Would you like to see more help text/perhaps links to tech notes? In terms of functionality, what additional checks would you like to see, warn if provisioning task hasn't run in X days, if tasks have failed state, if any indexes are marked as failed. What else? Looking forward to getting your feedback Mike Technical Director, Enterprise Vault Engineering

[Rob_Wilcox1]

I'd like to see the ability to tweet some/all of the system status "alerts".  That way people can see them even when they're not tied to the VAC.

[MichelZ]

yes, i think what rob says is very true (altough, I do not want to tweet about it...;) ), but I think at least sending an e-mail when something is wrong shouldn't be too hard for an e-mail archivng system, I think... ;)

I mean, come one...   the Management Pack for SCOM is a Joke (sorry), and who does really start up the VAC every day and sits there and watches those system alerts come up?... 

This has good potential to be... let's call it "optimized".

[Kopfjager]

I guess what I'm asking is if that ability is more important to you then seeing additional alerts for areas not in System Status? 

Tasks failing are not part of System Status currently but I would guess that this is something you would want to see notifications on.

If we remove the question of delivery (SS, tweet, email)  for the moment and just asked what you would want to be "alerted" on that either doesnt exist or does not stand out enough , what would you say?

[JesusWept3]

To be honest, i'd rather see the man power go more towards powershell, i think admins are more crying out for ability to enable, disable, synchronize, set up move archive etc etc through scripting .

The monitoring page is alright, and there have been times when some servers haven't archived for days because of continuous 3310's and it just gives the big ole green check

The fear i have with it from a support standpoint is that the checks are so simplistic that people simply go to either the system status or evom and see green across the board, there for everything is a-ok

[AndresMunoz]

Yes! more powershell... and some integration of that powershell functionality into the System Status

[Michael_Bilsbor]

Hi, This topic is around System Status/monitoring checks and not powershell. Powershell has already been discussed. I wholeheartedly agree that there is still much to do in System Status/monitoring which is why I'm asking for your thoughts. What you have to remember is, sure there are many companies for which powershell would be of great use(and we are looking into such things) but equally we get many calls from customers who's systems are not working and EV is not notifying them as such. Mike

[Simon_Butler]

Not finding it useful - Prefer not to have to open the VAC to see system status - don't want to deploy the console on every admins workstation and have the headache of updating that on a regular basis.  Web reports preferred.

Should be showing health of system but not used as a tool to check all indexes are ok - that would be poor monitoring.  If indexes go bust we want to know about it asap - not wait for an admin to open up the VAC...

Some ideas:  Single point of reference (Management Information) of health of system with drill-down into component parts.  I.e. is the system archiving/journaling; how much did it process in the last run; is that above/below expectations per system; are searches returning results within parameters; based on rolling averages, how much capacity is there in the system; Vault cache rebuilds/day/week;

Plus a big win for us would be the ability for the System Health to report on multiple directory installations and roll them up for health globally.

I'll ditto the PowerShell request.  The current toolset and it's a-sync nature does not fit well within corp environments who centralise all provisioning processes.  EVPM is no use for coding.  A PowerShell archive move which included all the relevant provisioning and deprovisioning steps would be far better than the move-archive process that has been released.

& ditto the SCOM view...really is sub-standard.  This & Powershell is where I'd focus efforts.  Drop the VAC system status and go back to WWW.

[Simon_Butler]

"What you have to remember is, sure there are many companies for which powershell would be of great use(and we are looking into such things) but equally we get many calls from customers who's systems are not working and EV is not notifying them as such."

Perhaps some investment in both?  Or EV will fall out of that Gartner Quadrant....

[Michael_Bilsbor]

Hi Simon, yes we are looking into both (looking not promising...) again what we are looking for is what additional checks to carry out. The checks may appear in the event log, ssytem status or SCOM or whatever. The question remains, what checks would be your top priority? Mike

[GertjanA]

Hello Mike,

It would be nice if it shows the remaining free diskspace on an open partition

It would be nice if it showed if any indexes are failed/rebuilding (not which, but how many)

It would be nice if somehow could show some MSMQ values (a5, storage?)

Failing tasks would indeed be nice.

I know most of this is in the monitoring webpage, but having this info in the status overview would be ok.

[JesusWept3]

In all honesty then i'm really confused as to why you would spend time developing two competing solutions between EVOM and System Status, it would make more sense to put in the system status checks in to EVOM and have the link in the MMC just open up the EVOM website

I think though what i'd like to see is maybe the top 5 errors and warnings in the last 24 hours, that would probably be the most useful to me

[AndresMunoz]

How about the ability to setup alerts (SMS or email)

[MarkBarefoot]

I think the idea behind System Status is good, but as many of the others have already commented, you ideally want a centralised, easy to get to summary page. What about really branching out and creating a smartphone app :)

[andyturn]

A simple webpage that shows the System Status of all Symantec products running on your network would be superb. 

[StephenKing]

I agree with andyturn a website/page that you could plugin Symantec products or have something feed into an existing company website say via a RSS feed being able to select the various alerting/monitoring you may actually want to view.

A simple Symantec Dashboard with your favorite alerts/monitoring on the frontpage and then various pages for each Symantec product you have, saves having to install additional products on each workstation or having to logon to the VAC.

I would like to see;

System resources (CPU, RAM, Process usage <just 5 highest used>)

Currently running/processing tasks

Storage/partitions available space with a bar to indicate available space

Service status

Backup modes

Status of previous tasks if they were successful

Thanks

[Ben_Shorehill]

Service/Tasks down alerts, Vault down to x% alerts, Backups missed etc. I imagine that there are probably some people working in EV dev who are pretty good at putting emails on exchange so it shouldn't be that hard to get up and running. 

[wilsond3010]

I would like too see it stops archiving if the sql database connection down for a extended period.

We ran into a issue where the sql server was down but the server team didn't stop the tasks for enterprise vault

So it kept archiving and filling up the msmq until they're was no disk space left and then it stopped all servers but then I couldn't restart the services because I had less than 5% free

[JesusWept3]

Wilson, that should technically be impossible for the fact that each time Enterprise Vault attempts to archive an item it has to write entries to the vault store databases, possibly the fingerprint database and make some adjustments to the directory database.
 

[wilsond3010]

nope it's possible I would have agreed with you if I hadn't seen it done