Solutions:
Diamond Sierra's Paul Bunyan Log Management System (PBLMS)
has played a pivotal role in a wide variety of solutions
to customer needs. Here are just a few of the uses
our current customers have informed us of. If you
have used PBLMS to help with a specific solution and would
like to share it, please let our sales department know.
Time to Market
Diamond Sierra's message logging tool suite,
PBLMS, dramatically
reduces time to market by streamlining and optimizing
all phases of software development.
In the initial
proof of concept and rapid prototyping phases, Paul Bunyan's
message logging provides robust and
detailed information to developers while avoiding the
need for elaborate and man-hour intensive GUI development.
During development and release phases message logging
tools drastically cut debugging and diagnostic time.
In the final phases of pre- and post-release testing Paul
Bunyan is an invaluable
timesaving
alternative to complicated and limited GUI based
regression testing products.
PBLMS also streamlines the entire ramp-up process for
post-release production, maintenance, and support readiness
by quickly providing powerful, timesaving diagnostic capabilities,
real-time application
status monitoring and notification, and automated
event handling.
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Production System
Availability
Diamond Sierra's message logging
tool suite, PBLMS,
sharply reduces production system downtime. Use of
Paul Bunyan's message logging during initial application
development phases greatly reduces overall development
and debugging
time, thereby providing additional time for writing
more robust code and for carrying out more complete
testing.
Once the application is released and in production,
Ox and
Falcon provide
constant real-time
monitoring of
status and performance,
alerting maintenance
personnel instantly to failures or
performance degradations,
thereby starting the downtime recovery and/or avoidance
process immediately. During the actual recovery effort
in a downtime scenario, Diamond Sierra's suite of powerful
diagnostic tools provides detailed historical data for pinpointing
the original problem as well as
rich information for rapid solution or workaround attempts.
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Real-time Performance
Monitoring
Diamond Sierra's event monitor,
Falcon, provides
flexible and powerful monitoring of timed events.
Production systems can be continuously monitored in real-time
for performance degradations or heartbeat interruptions.
Detections of out-of-tolerance activities can then be routed
to Ox for
automated handling
and/or emergency notification
of maintenance and support personnel.
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Enhancing
Technical Support
Diamond Sierra's message
logging tool suite,
PBLMS, greatly enhances the quality and effectiveness
of technical and help desk support. PBLMS provides comprehensive
real-time monitoring of software application status
as well as instantaneous event notification. Support
staff will subsequently have
rich information at their fingertips and will also
be notified of
critical events by PBLMS immediately rather than
by customers and clients minutes or hours later.
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Event Notification (Email/Paging)
Diamond
Sierra's message logging tool suite,
PBLMS, provides
for very powerful event notification. Standard enterprise
event handling systems (e.g. Tivoli®, NetIQ®, RoboMon®,
etc.) are greatly limited in their utility because of their
lack of access to low-level
internal information
from software applications. Where most event handling systems
can only detect very macroscopic failures such as process
stoppages or queue overflows, Paul Bunyan starts the notification
process the instant an internal function call fails and
is logged.
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Integration
With Enterprise Event Handling Systems
Paul
Bunyan's powerful
open architecture provides access to
log messages
via its message handler
interface. Message handlers enable translation of
log messages
into various kinds of events and/or communication with various
application APIs, thus turning Paul Bunyan into a seamless
interface to virtually any enterprise event handling system
(e.g. Tivoli®, NetIQ®, RoboMon®, or Opalis®). Moreover,
Paul Bunyan also serves as single common denominator 'glue
code' between software applications and event handling systems.
It not only provides invaluable access to low-level
internal
status and error information but also provides a standard
notification API as an alternative to the risk of coding
to vendor-specific event handling system interfaces.
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Eliminate
Performance Bottlenecks
Identifying and
eliminating performance bottlenecks is critical for
today's business applications. Corporate reputation, competitiveness,
and profitability often hinge on application responsiveness
and transaction turnaround time.
Paul Bunyan is the
perfect tool for performance analysis.
Log message timestamps provide the ideal stopwatch data
from every step of workflow operation. Where traditional
profilers are restricted to standalone applications, Paul
Bunyan's data collection
API spans
COM objects, batch files, ASP pages, database stored procedures,
and more. It then
consolidates
that data across components, applications, servers, networks,
and even remote
locations, pulling it all together into a single
display query. And with logging rates in excess
of 50,000 messages per second it has virtually zero
performance impact on the application under analysis.
Performance analysis with Paul Bunyan also requires
no additional coding, time consuming instrumentation,
or cumbersome process/component invocations - it simply
uses the log messages already in place for
diagnostic,
testing, and
monitoring purposes.
And in multi-thread/process environments with concurrent
transaction processing, Paul Bunyan's powerful
filtering capabilities easily isolate individual transactions
and workflow operations into non-overlapping stopwatch data
sets for meaningful analysis.
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Analyze Database Activity
Diamond Sierra's
message logging tool suite,
PBLMS, provides
very powerful functionality for analyzing and/or diagnosing
database activity. Native APIs for databases such as SQL
Server and Sybase are provided as freeware
API extensions,
enabling highly robust and
information rich logging directly from stored procedures
while incurring virtually zero
performance impact. Logging from stored procedures brought
into context with logging from client applications provides
invaluable information for
diagnosing
database problems and/or
tuning interactive
performance.
In addition to the
native API add-ins for SQL Server and Sybase, an ODBC trace
utility is also provided as freeware. It is used to intercept
and log ODBC traffic between clients and servers and may
be downloaded with source code from the
freeware page.
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Implement Full Regression Testing
Paul
Bunyan's message logging brings regression testing to a
completely different level than traditional regression
testing utilities. The typical regression testing tool does
little more than run repeatable test scripts and compare
resultant GUI screen captures. This technique is entirely
dependent upon GUIs that do not change, and more importantly,
GUIs that exist. Many of today's applications are
backend distributed transaction processing systems with
no GUI components whatsoever.
Paul Bunyan addresses
the problem of regression testing with the very straightforward
yet very powerful technique of simply comparing before and
after sets of log messages. This has the advantage of being
GUI-independent and also provides the ability to carry out
regression testing on highly complex multithreaded, distributed
systems as log messages can be
consolidated
from multiple machines and then
filtered and
sorted according to virtually any criteria prior to
before/after analysis.
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Trap Operating System
Alerts
Paul Bunyan is easily integrated
with NT's Performance Monitor for system alert notification.
Performance Monitor can be configured to monitor a wide
array of alertable events and execute programs and/or commands
when various trigger conditions are met.
When configured to invoke Paul Bunyan's command line
API executable,
PBLog.exe, to create
log messages,
the logging of system alerts becomes seamlessly
integrated
with logging from all other
sources. The sample
screen capture demonstrates using PBLog.exe with NT's
Performance Monitor to automatically log information about
free disk space, providing valuable contextual information
for other diagnostic
logging.
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Intercept
Operating System / 3rd Party API Calls
Diamond
Sierra's API interceptor is a powerful low level diagnostic
and monitoring utility. It allows virtually any API
call (whether exported from operating system DLLs or 3rd
party DLLs) to be invisibly intercepted for debugging, auditing,
or monitoring purposes. API interception technology is
invaluable for debugging internal problems with 3rd
party libraries, tracing Win32 calls buried within MFC classes,
capturing OutputDebugString() logging, verifying function
call arguments, and more. It is provided as a freeware utility
and is downloadable with source code from the
freeware
page.
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Debug
TCP/IP (Socket) Communications
Diamond Sierra's
TCP/IP socket interceptor is a powerful client/server communications
diagnostic utility. It allows any TCP/IP conversation to
be invisibly intercepted, logging all traffic between client
and server. It is provided as a freeware utility and is
downloadable with source code from the
freeware page.
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