MonitorWare Knowledge Base

Dear All,

Adiscon is proud to announce the release of MonitorWare Agent 3.0. Principal features enhancements include new probe services, more user friendly user interface, MonitorWare configuration wizard and many more.

"MonitorWare Agent 3.0 that is equipped with improved SNMP implementation, new services and other enhancements is the result of our commitment to optimal system monitoring and open standards. I would especially like to thank our entire beta testers which really helped us to come up with a real world product features", says Adiscon President Rainer Gerhards.

This release has ultimately helped us to increase the flexibility of our suite of products. MonitorWare Agent 3.0 offers many enhancements, both from a usability point of view as well as from the actual feature set. The most highlighted additions are listed below:

1. New Major Additions

Added New Services - A bunch of new probe based services has been added. These new services include FTP, HTTP, IMAP, NNTP, POP3 and SMTP probe services. These services keep all features and filters specialized for there specific protocols.

MonitorWare Agent Client: New filter dialog and insert properties content menus for better usability.

CPU Monitor: Now, you can configure total, virtual and physical memory separately.

MWAgent Client: New changed popup menu for services, rule sets and action menu. It looks more user friendly and is sorted by categories.

SETP Action: Two new connections based on configurable timeouts are added, one is used during the connection and the other used when receiving and sending the data. A higher timeout default might be useful in unreliable networks, or if the server is under high workload.

New Action HttpRequest added: This new action can be used to simply request a web page with some parameters. This might be useful in order to trigger a web based application with the help of MonitorWare Agent.

MIB Browser: Now, MonitorWare Agent has a MIB browser which can be used to browse through all MIBS that are installed with MonitorWare Agent. Customized MIBs are also possible.

General Debug Logging: MonitorWare Agent has been added with enhanced debug logging format, you can now disable or enable all debug facilities individually. This makes the analysis of debug logs for you and us much easier

SETP Sender/SETP Receiver: A new option "Session Timeout" has been added. Before this, it was a hard coded value but now it is configurable. The default value is 30 seconds. That means a connection to the SETP Server is at least kept open for 30 seconds. This reduces the connection overhead, especially for SSL based connections.

Database Action: A new option "Maximum value length" for the SystemEventProperties table has been added. By default this option value is set to 512, which is the default maximum length of the value field. If a property exceeds this length, it is truncated automatically. This removes random occurring ODBC Error's when the property value is more then 512 characters.

Connection handling in the SETP Server: Enhanced handling is introduced here, if problems occur during sending/receiving messages, more retries are done.

Control NT Service Action: This Action can be used to control a service, you can Start, Stop, Restart, Pause or continue a Service.

Compute Status Variable Action: For more complex tasks, added a new action to increment or decrement a status variable. Currently the "NTServicemonitorAlerter & Recoverer" sample uses this action to implement a reminder.

SETP Server: Startup retry handling is added into the SETP Server, it retries to bind the sockets during startup. It is now compiled with the new OpenSSL library version 0.9.7e and dll's are also updated.

Property Engine: A new property called "ntservname" has been added, which contains the internal service name of a NT Service. The existing service name property has been renamed and still represents the "Service Display Name".

NT Service Monitor Service: A new option "Generate an event if a Service is in the running state" has been added to NT service monitor service. This option is needed for the alert and recovery handling of services.

Start Program Action: A new option has been added to use the property engine in the parameters variable, which is needed for alert and recovery handling. The old format is still useable if the legacy option is enabled.

General: Two new configuration samples into the setup are added, a Ping Probe Alerter and a NT Service Monitor Alerter & Recoverer.

File Monitor: Support for UNICODE files is added. The detection of Unicode files is automatic and transparent for you. You can also customize the line delimiter. Line buffer is also increased up to 64KB.

Syslog Server: A new feature for Syslog over TCP is added and you can also configure a message separator. This separator is used to split useful messages. Two timeouts are also added for Syslog over TCP, message receive timeout and session timeout. Once the Syslog Server starts receiving a message, it waits until it receives a message separator (if configured), or until the message completion timeout occurs. The session timeout is an additional timeout.

Debug enhancement: The debug format has been highly enhanced. Each debug line is pre-pended by some general parameters like ThreadID, UNIX Timestamp and the Debuglevel. This makes the debug file much more readable and easier for analysis.

SNMP Action: The value of a variable is now expandable with the property engine.

Added SID Cache: A cache for SID's is added, which are primary resolved in the Event log Monitor. This improves the performance when reading the Security log.

2. Bugs Removed

File Monitor: Fixed a bug in the file name generation which caused the File Monitor not to process file changes anymore. For example when daily log files were monitored, and for one day no log file was generated, the bug occurred and the file monitoring stopped working.

SETP Sender & Server: Fixed a connection shut down which only happened when a message larger then 4097 bytes was received.

Monitor: Fixed minor bugs in the new SID cache of the Event log monitor.

MonitorWare Agent Client: Errors are fixed. The error in the SNMP MIB browser, which only happened to occur for the first time, it was opened. The error, if nothing was entered into the last record value of the event log monitor event options, the client crashed. Few bugs in the XML import & export functions are fixed, which were due to some of the global filter conditions not correctly exported. Besides this a minor bug in the new action wizard is also fixed, which used to crash your client, if you selected advanced and directly clicked finished.

SETP Server: Bug is fixed that caused a "virtual" SSL shut down error. A bug in the decompression code that could be caused by larger events and could cause the SETP server to fail due to memory corruption is fixed now. A bug is fixed in the Shut down procedure of the SETP Server which could occur if SSL was enabled and the MonitorWare Agent service was stopped.

SNMP Receiver: When a SNMP version 2 message was received, the variable OID's were not fully resolved or included into the message. This has been fixed now. A bug is fixed that used to come if an enterprise specific trap was received. The source was not correctly parsed, so the IP was not correctly shown. A bug is fixed that has been introduced to Build 261 caused the application to crash, if messages other then those from the event log monitor were received over SETP.

Event log Action: If properties were used in the message, they got over written by the first occurrence of the action with fixed values, it is fixed now.

SETP Sender: A minor bug in the connection close handling that has been introduced due the new "crash" handling is fixed. This caused random Event ID 114 errors in the Event log. A bug in the timeout function of the SETP Server is fixed. If the connection went down while the connection was kept open, it might cause application to crash.

Database Action: Problems in handling of TEXT type fields are fixed. Text fields can be built out of properties, so they are more customizable then the other field types.

Status Filter & Action: A bug introduced in one of the earlier build is also fixed, which caused the status filter & action not to work correctly.

Information and support on MonitorWare Agent is available at our forum (at the URL's mentioned below) as well as via our other support systems.
support@adiscon.com

Download the current MonitorWare Agent 3.0 from this link:
www.mwagent.com/en/Download/

www.mwagent.com/en/Manual/Current/index.html
- This link points to the online manual of MonitorWare Agent 3.0.

www.adiscon.org/manuals/MonitorWareAgent-30.pdf
-This link points to the printable version of MonitorWare Agent 3.0 (PDF format).

Note: Old PDF versions are also present at site for those who need them.

Best Regards,
Hamid Ali Raja
Adiscon