“Our organization doesn’t have a network operations center (NOC), so we’ve leveraged Sysgem as a sort of ‘virtual NOC’. Here are a few examples: From the network perspective, we ping the clients on a regular basis and report accordingly. From a system security perspective, we report on potential system intrusions and report excessive password failures. From an operational perspective, we set up rules to ensure that certain required batch jobs and/or detached processes are always present/running, and to restart them if they fail. We also report on stopped print queues. We have rules that scan for potential runaway processes or a high CPU load. From a system hardware perspective, we have rules that monitor our shadowed disks, and report if there is a change in the status. We also monitor disk space, with alarms set for different thresholds on different disks. While we’ve had ‘watchdog jobs’ for some of those functions listed above, those only add more processes to our systems, where Sysgem only has one client process to do its work. Having a centralized reporting facility like Sysgem means I don’t have to spend a lot of time digging through log files (in the event of an error), etc. I just have to glance at the display for a real-time status. By automating a lot of this monitoring (both for OpenVMS and Unix/Linux systems), each admin as freed up several hours per week, and we’ve eliminated the need for a dedicated operations employee. Aside from freeing up a lot of my time, using Sysgem has really paid off in other ways as well. Instead of interrupting my workflow periodically to look for/investigate errors, error messages now come to me. That allows me a more uninterrupted and productive day. My boss likes that.”