Snapshot TSC. Award winning Systems Management for your i5/OS (OS/400) Server.

What's New in Snapshot/TSC 10.6?

The MINIMUM release level of OS/400 for Snapshot/TSC is V5R3. Do NOT attempt to install this on a system earlier than V5R3. It now also requires the .NET v2 Framework. This will automatically downloaded and installed if not already available during the installation of Snapshot.

General:

Orion HA Interface :

If you are replicating your environment with Orion HA software, Snapshot/TSC can interface with it. This allows data to be collected on the status of each of the links for each interval. Data collected includes queue differences and inactive objects etc. Please note that this server requires the Orion HA software to be installed and running.

Better Vista / Windows 7 support:

The email alerting interface has been updated to work much more efficiently. Emails are now sent in the background so that Snapshot does not get held up while sending emails. We also added support for SMTP user authentication.

Ability to choose a location for system data:

You can now choose a different location to store the system data, allowing you to store the data on another drive.

Added ability to select a font colour as well as the background colour for systems:

You can now select a font color to better suit the systems color.

Collection library clearing:

Snapshot/TSC, while active, can automatically clear the IBM collection library QMPGDATA. This library tends to grow as more Snapshot data is collected. This option allows for an automatic END and RESTART of the IBM collection services coupled with a CLRLIB for QMPGDATA. Please be aware that if IBM is monitoring this system through Performance Manager and supplies periodic reports on this system's performance, you should NOT clear the collection libraries. This process will interfere with IBM's Performance Manager reporting.

Modules:

Top Jobs:

Added *VALUE keyword for use in alerts.

Message Queue Monitoring:

Added temperature based messages to the default messages to be monitored.

Message Queue Monitoring:

Messages above severity no longer includes messages requiring a reply.

Message Queue Monitoring:

Added an option to ignore messages which have already been processed by Snapshot to stop multiple alerts being sent out for the same message.

SMS:

Added support for Falcom Tango GSM modem.

CPU:

Added response time alert.

Disk:

Added support for new SAS drives.

What’s New in Snapshot/TSC 10.5?

Rollback Utility:

The Rollback utility (from v8.1) has been re-written and is now incorporated in the Snapshot release. In the event of data corruption, the Rollback utility allows you to recover some lost data. You can also use this to manually purge the Snapshot data files to remove any old history that you no longer require.

Email Alerts:

Prompt for backup:

Option to disable the prompt for backup option displayed when closing Snapshot/TSC.

Backup Utility:

The backup utility now allows a directory to be specified other than the Snapshot/TSC directory to store the backups in. This can be a local drive, or a network drive.

Models File:

Models list is now much easier to modify. Now it only requires you to enter in the model name, interactive and batch CPW and the number of CPUs.

Lowercase Passwords:

Snapshot now works with lowercase passwords.

Beep Alert:

Beep alerting on priority 5 now just displays the message without making any noise. All other priorities will continue to beep.

Modules:

LPAR:

Added ability to graph and report on CPU usage of LPARs as an entire system using dynamic LPARs (Uncapped LPARs). With the added data-sources you will always know exactly how much of your system is being used for the partition. The percentage used for the LPAR is no longer set by the user; it is now read directly from the system.

Message Monitor:

Ability to suppress an alert completely, increased the maximum text length and added ability to filter on a phrase within the message text. eg. Only if message contains 'product'.

Keywords:

Added extra keywords to the alerts for the following modules: CPU, Remote Response, Job Queue, Subsystem.

System:

The ability to alert on the connection between the Snapshot/TSC client and the server is now included, as well as monitoring whether the server is accessible. If the connection between the two is lost at any time, or the Snapshot/TSC client is unable to ping the server, an alert can now be triggered to inform that Snapshot/TSC is no longer monitoring the server.

CPU:

CPU graphs can now be graphed in LPAR view (default) or in system view, allowing you to display what it’s using on its partition and what its using over the entire system right next to each other.

Report Generator:

Top Job Sort:

The top job sort function has now returned. This gives you the ability to graph the top number of jobs or users over a selected date period.

Graphing multiple systems:

The Report Generator now includes the ability to graph multiple systems on a single graph. Used correctly this can be a great advantage. eg. You could have a graph showing you the CPU usage for each partition on your server on a single graph. If set in ‘system’ mode, you could then stack these graphs and get the CPU usage over your entire system.

What’s New in Snapshot/TSC 10.1?

3 - Tier :

The 3-Tier functionality (from v8.1) has been re-written and is now incorporated in the Snapshot/TSC v10.1 release. 3-Tier gives the ability for the Snapshot/TSC client to act as a server and therefore allowing other clients to view the data directly off that PC without having to retrieve all the data from the AS/400 (i5/iSeries).

Alert Filters:

Alert filters have been updated to make alerting easier. Select which remote systems, jobs, users, sub-systems etc., to alert on, or not alert on.

SMS Alerts:

Like with emails, SMS now allows the same message to multiple numbers.

Email Alerts:

The email alerting interface has been updated to work much more efficiently.

Prompt for backup:

Disable the prompt for backup option displayed when closing Snapshot/TSC.

Backup Utility:

The backup utility now allows a directory to be specified other than the Snapshot/TSC directory to store the backups in. This can be a local drive, or a network drive.

Modules:

Library Stats:
The Library Stats module has had an overhaul. It now keeps history of all the libraries, along with also collecting IFS information. Data sources are included so that the data can be displayed in any view, along with alerts and reports.

Job Management:

The Job Management module allows Snapshot/TSC to perform alerting of jobs that must be either running or not running at a certain time, through the standard Snapshot alerting interface.

Top Memory:

Like the Top Jobs module, Snapshot/TSC now collects information on the Top Memory users. Display, alert and run reports on the current and maximum unprotected memory as well as the user, job, job number, pool and memory use of the top memory users.