MonitorWare Knowledge Base

Hi,

once again we open our so called Rolling Beta program. Features and fixes will be done continuously, also possible by requests. The changelog below helps you to keep track on the changes. Feel free to test this new rolling beta version, if you are experiencing any problems, kindly let us know via support email (support@adiscon.com) or this forum.

You can have a look into the Manual for MonitorWare Agent Rolling Beta as well.

Updated Information's since 2006-03:
The current rolling beta will become the next major MonitorWare Agent Version. There fore, the major version number has been raised to 4. Existing installations with a Version 3 key will continue to run with the new rolling beta till 2006-06-01! If you own UpgradeInsurance, contact sales@adiscon.com (Send them your UpgradeInsurance ID as well) and request a new license key.

Updated Information's since 2006-01:
MonitorWare Agent is now available for 2 platforms. For the win32 platform as before and now also for the x64 platform. The x64 Version of the MonitorWare Agent is still experimental, but has passed our internal basics tests and seems to work fine.
However we expect that there are still bugs in this edition. Also note that you can not cross update from the win32 to the x64 Version yet. If you want to do so, you can manually backup your registry settings, uninstall the MonitorWare Agent, install the x64 Version and reimport the registry settings.

Download of the Win32 rolling beta
Download of the x64 rolling beta

Below the change since version 3.1:
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2006-04-05 / build 305
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Features/Enhancements
- Eventlog Monitor: Added a major feature into the Eventlog Monitor. It is now possible to monitor the Eventlog from remote machines. We also read the message libraries from the remote location. The default administrative shares have to be intact for this feature, and MonitorWare Agent has to be configured to run with a user account that has sufficient rights on the remote machine.
- File Monitor: Added Option "Skip Lines on Startup". If this option is enabled, the File Monitor will skip all new Lines of a logfile during startup. Please note that this will only work in SingleFile Mode.

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2006-03-27 / build 304
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Features/Enhancements
- SNMP Service/Action: Updated code basis to the latest NET-SNMP Version.
- Property Replacer: Enhanced the property replacer so that now the ToPos can also contain a seach expression. The syntax is the same as in FromPos, Example: %msg:/start/$:/end/%
This will return the text between the strings "start" and "end" (where "end" is only searched in the string after "start".

Bugfixes
- Mail Action: Fixed a bug which could occur if a connection was closed after the session timeout. In very seldom cases, this could have caused an access violation.

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2006-03-22 / build 303
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Features/Enhancements
- Major Version has been changed to 4.0
- OleDB / ODBC Action: You can now use the Property Replacer in varchar type field. This support is automatically enabled for each field if the value starts
with a % character. Otherwise, the whole value is seen as one property (As it was before already). Only use the Property Replacer if necessary, as it needs more performance then a single property during runtime.

Bugfixes
- OleDB Action: The OLEDB Action can now create it's own Parameter data. This was needed for OLEDB Provider with less features. While testing with the open source version of MyOLEDB (OLEDB Driver for Mysql), this became necessary.
- OleDB Action: Added support for decimal and numeric database fields. This support was also needed for MS Access databases.

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2006-02-17 / build 301
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Features/Enhancements
- OLEDB Action added: This is another major feature enhancement. Due the changes to x64, it became more important to also support the newer database layer from Microsoft called OLEDB. The OLEDB Action works similar to the ODBC Action from configuration point of few. The MS SQL OLEDB Provider and JET4.0 OLEDB Provider have been successfully tested in the Win32 environment. The JET4.0 Provider seems to still have problems in x64 environment, we will address this problem in the next days/weeks. In the firsts test, there was a performance enhancement of up to 30% compared to ODBC. So this action might become very useful for people with large amount of data to be logged into a MS SQL database.
- WriteFile Action: Removed a hard coded minimum limit of 2 files when circular logging was enabled. This makes it possible to have a file rolled over when it has reached a specific size.

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2006-01-13 / build 300
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Features/Enhancements
- Engine: Major compatibility changes for the x64 platform have been made in the MWAgent core. MWAgent is now available in 2 editions, a Win32 and x64 Edition.
- Engine: Added SIGNAL handler for the console mode of the Agent. This means if you run the Agent in console mode and press CTRL+C, the Agent will terminate as it would have been stopped using the ServiceControlManager.
- Database Action: Added more diagnostic debug output which is useful for troubleshooting.
- File Monitor: Added 2 new properties called %msgsep% and %msgseplast%. This 2 properties hold the current and last used line separator. This is needed if you want to reconstruct messages where the separator is part of the message.
- Engine [x64 only]: Due the x64 platform changes, a DWORD Values will be saved as QWORD into the registry. However the MWAgent Client and Win32 Build can handle these datatype and convert these values automatically into DWORD if needed.

Bugfixes
- Engine: Fixed a few minor bugs in the shutdown process, but nothing which is important for the running Agent process.
- Database Action[x64 only]: Fixed a few compatibility issues. Note that there are currently very few ODBC drivers for x64 available! (as a side-note, we are also working on OLEDB support - stay tuned for updates)
- Database Action: Fixed a bug with the property inserts (If value was above 256 bytes) that caused the insert statements to fail if MS Access was used as database.
- Discard Action: The Discard Action was not handled anymore. This bug was introduced during the major engine changes in Build 297.
- Engine: Improved string handling with large strings like binary data from an Eventlog entry.

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2005-11-21 / build 298
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Features/Enhancements
- Engine: Enabled multithreaded Queue Engine. This is a major step forward in performance on multi CPU machines!
- Property Engine: Added a new Option for time related properties. Within the properties, all time is based on UTC regardless if your preferred time is UTC or localtime. So if you want to display localtime instead of UTC, you have to use the following syntax: %variable:::localtime%
Bugfixes
- Engine: Fixed a few minor bugs to make the all Actions multithreaded save.
- Client: Fixed a bug in the CallRuleSet Action Form. The RuleSetName was not saved on initial creation of such an action.

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2005-11-10 / build 297
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Features/Enhancements
- Engine: Important Engine Enhancement! The Action processing engine has been multithread enabled, which means that the overall processing performance will increase in larger environments and MWAgent will benefit from SMP machines. However as we discovered a bug in this new enhancement, it has bee disabled in the MWAgent for now! But with the next RB, we plan to have these problems fixed and enable this new feature.
- Eventlog Monitor: Added support for "preferred language" selection. This means you can now select a preferred language, and the Eventlog Monitor will send the message in this language. It will only work if these languages are installed and message libs are available with the preferred language. If this fails, it will automatically fall back to the system default language.

Bugfixes
- Engine: Fixed a problem that lead to defunctional service if an invalid InfoUnit type was detected. Now, invalid InfoUnits are simply ignored.
- Client: Fixed a bug that the comments of Filters were not copied if a rule was cloned.

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2005-11-05 / build 296
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Bugfixes
- Engine: Fixed a bug that was introduced in the new ActionRetry logic which caused the Agent to reprocess Actions even if they succeeded.

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2005-11-04 / build 295
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Features/Enhancements
- Engine: Compiled engine with new OpenSSL Version ( 0.9.8a ) and created updated DLL files.
Bugfixes
- Database Action: If a connection is broken, MWAgent gracefully shutdowns the DB Connection and tries to reopen the Connection with the next Action call. However a bug has been fixed in this shutdown code that aborted the shutdown and caused further problems with the Action.

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2005-11-04 / build 294
======================

Features/Enhancements
- Engine: Added retry logic into the RuleEngine. If enabled, the Agent retries Actions on failure (until the retry counter is reached). Note that the Event error 114 will only be written if the last retry failed, previous error's will only be logged in the debug log (With the error facility).
- Engine: Added new additional handling for low-memory cases. MWAgent allocates some emergency memory on startup. If the system memory limit is reached, it releases the emergency memory and locks the queue. That means not more items can be queued, this prevents a crash of the Agent and the queue is still being processed. Many other positions in the code have been hardened against out of memory sceneries.
- FileMonitor: Added support for multiline terminator support and space compression.
- FileMonitor: Added new Multiple Files feature which means you can now read an array of files. This will require a wildcard in the filename.
- FileMonitor: A new variable %generatedfilename% has been added, which will contain the fully generated filename (Can be useful for filtering).
- WriteFile Action: Optimized filename generation, which is now cached if possible.

Bugfixes
- SNMP Receiver: Enterprise SNMP Traps were not correctly processed and variables resolved, this has been fixed now.
- SNMP Receiver: There exist a problem with some SNMP Devices and the internal NETSNMP variable resolving function. The enhanced (Fully resolve Mibnames) method has been fixed and resolves this Mibnames correctly now. If you experience any Problem, enable this Option in your SNMP Receiver.
- Engine: Changed the default Queue count from infinite to 200000 items.
- Engine: Implemented the new LibLogging Version ( 0.6.0 ). In previous versions changing the listening port from 601 to any other in RFC3195 format does not take affect. This is fixed now.