Overview

Easy Cross-Platform Service Level Management

Monitoring iSeries and Windows system performance is a critical task. In e-business and 24/7 environments, processing workloads becomes more complex and less predictable. Complying with SLAs is increasingly difficult and to optimize performance you need to:

• Get immediate alerts regarding potential performance problems
• Drill down to identify performance bottlenecks
  
• Take corrective action before your business starts to slow down
  
• Create historical reports to demonstrate level of service and justify system upgrades

Hundreds of companies worldwide are using our award-winning performance management platform to minimize unplanned downtime, ensure the highest availability, guarantee Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and leverage business processes in iSeries based infrastructures.

With the new VISUAL Control for Windows, all this power is now available for Windows systems and SNMP devices.

Your IT infrastructure's pilot cockpit: Consolidate the vital signs of your servers in a single console

For the first time, IT departments can concurrently control from the same easy to use graphical interface, any number and combination of iSeries, Windows servers and SNMP-based devices (including Linux, Unix and AIX systems).

The console of VISUAL Control for Windows is the performance "cockpit" displaying real-time performance monitoring graphics with practically no overhead, collecting and analyzing thousands of performance metrics (CPU usage, memory, processes, hard drives, operating systems, jobs, etc.) many times per minute and reacting automatically to any potential problem. No more guessing - see exactly what is happening, right at the very second.

All the views feature historical tracking of parameters. For every vital sign in the console there are micro-charts that indicate historical performance trends for the last 10 measurements, the last hour and the last 24 hours.

Customizable Performance Management

Although built as a complete ready-to-use solution with predefined thresholds and alarms, based on widely accepted best practices, VISUAL Control for Windows offers unique programming tools so you can align it with your business scenario.

With the embedded ALEV logical expression editor, you can easily develop scripts and set multiple variables, specifying your own requirements, thresholds and alert conditions. A performance alarm might need to be triggered when a job's memory usage threshold is surpassed, but only if it is executed in a specific server, during a precise time/date frame, and if submitted by a specific user. This is an example of the level of customization that you might need to handle on a daily basis.

Use SNMP traps and system commands to manage the performance monitoring of Linux, Unix and AIX systems, as well as routers and any SNMP network devices from the same console.

Integrate VISUAL Control for Windows with VISUAL Message Center to implement a Business Service Management (BSM) strategy, and feed service level charts into your company Intranet in real-time.

Autonomic computing capabilities

Whenever any key performance threshold is passed on any system or partition, alarms are triggered according to custom specified levels and variables. Abusive users, full disks, interactive thresholds, memory faults, slow response times… an email or SMS alert is sent to operators and escalated to managers, until the problem is solved.

Proactive actions can also be automated to correct problems - e.g. a high CPU consuming job can be held to prevent it from bringing the whole system to its knees. You can define and modify priorities for any job or process performed in your servers.

Integrate VISUAL Control for Windows with the VISUAL Control Center Suite for full self-tuning capabilities.

Service Level Reporting

The embedded Reporting System allows easy creation of performance reports in any standard format with historical correlation features. VISUAL Control for Windows can instantly generate performance portlets that you can feed into your company's corporate web portal to inform all your LOBs about the Service Levels provided. This feature is fully compatible with Websphere Portal Server (read the quick setup guide).

This is a valuable tool to analyze trends, delivering detailed information and easy to understand charts to senior management when taking critical technical decisions.

VISUAL Control Performance Planner add-on.

Historical performance analysis tool for problem identification, growth management and capacity planning.

• See up to three years of performance data in easy-to-understand graphs.
• Know when you need to upgrade
• Try out possible configurations
• Upgrade with confidence and concrete justification.

Read more about VISUAL Control Performance Planner add-on.

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