LEM - The Lawson S3 Environment Monitor
"You can sleep tonight, LEM is awake..."
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LEM, the Lawson S3 Environment Monitor is now Generally Available. After months of refinement and thorough testing in a variety of environments on many different systems. LEM is currently monitoring over 100 Lawson systems where the admins have learned to rely on it the way I have. Among those clients is a major midwestern hospital system, monitoring well over a dozen Lawson environments across 4 different AIX servers, with a 5th about to join the mix. At another site LEM is monitoring numerous 8.0.x and LSF 9.0 environments across a variety of operating systems. Another is monitoring their Unix machines and displaying the results on Windows webservers. Yet another is using LEM's "remote display" option to feed a remote monitoring service without have to grant constant VPN access. LEM has been faced with almost every possible obstacle and has graciously overcome them.
LEM grew out of the world of the harried Lawson System Administrator needing a tool that could watch multiple Lawson Environments, and even multiple machines of Lawson Environments, for issues that regularly require some sort of administrative action. Jobs go into "Needs Recovery" - disk spaces suddenly fill up - sometimes whole environments go down, all with little advance warning - and our harried Lawson Admin usually finds out when his/her phone rings with a user on the other end - never a good situation.
LEM helps eliminate those phone calls, with both visual cues and emails, to let the admin know exactly what is happening on each of his/her machines and in each of the Lawson environments on them.
LEM has a simple web display that shows, at a glance, how things are going. Based on the simple principle that "GREEN IS GOOD", each environment listing displays a color representative of the health of that environment - and links to a page that shows the relative health of each of the monitored processes. The web page background changes color to reflect the WORST status on any item monitored in any of your environments and provides links to allow you to gather details on exactly what is happening. If things suddenly jump from GREEN to RED you know you'd better go investigate. There's also an intermediary color, YELLOW, to let you know to "take a look" before the users become aware of any potential problems. Of course GREEN, YELLOW and RED are just LEM's default colors. You can define them as anything you like during the configuration process.
Accompanying the web display is an email based warning system that will send a message to any number of email addresses whenever certain, user configurable, limits are passed. If those conditions persist, there are 2 levels of escalation - again all user configurable.
Current Functions:
* Monitors multiple Envs on the same machine
* Monitors the Lawson daemons in each of your environments to be sure they are running.
* Monitors Job Queues for your defined errors: "Needs Recovery", "Waiting", "Queue Disabled", etc.. and displays them without having to login to LID
* Reports on Running, Waiting and Recurring Jobs about to be launched
* Ignores specified environments that you take down for maintenance, etc..
* Marks INACTIVE any Environments defined in /etc/lawson.env that do not exist (failover setup)
* Screen background changes to reflect the WORST issue in any environment giving instant warning
* Special view to show "just the issues" so you can survey all your issues in all environments at a single glance.
* Commandline reporting when there's not a web browser handy.
* Sends Email warnings to specified addresses at different warning levels (user defined) - Can send a complete status report and/or just a warning and a link (perfect for SMS to cell phones and text pagers)
* Notification Escalation with 2 levels of escalation to different email lists
* Supports display on any webserver, Windows or Unix, local or remote
* Supports web page upload to a remote webserver outside your network, to enable remote administration monitoring without requiring VPN access.
* All colors and setups are completely user configurable
* Displays time of most recent status change on main page & displays each historical Status Change and issue duration on individual Environment Pages
* Usually installs in under an hour
* Can be interfaced into most other monitoring systems as an extension to do Lawson specific monitoring
* Supports it's own "extension programs" to monitor anything you choose
Current extensions include:
* Monitor Lawson Disk Space: You define the "% used" on which to warn
* Monitor whether laua security is ON or OFF: Can also IGNORE specified environments
* Monitor Job Queues for Long Running jobs: You decide how long is LONG
* Monitor ProcessFlow Engines and the ProcessFlow RMI server
* Monitor Print Directories and notifies you of resource hogging users
* Monitor Work Directory to tell you when you have too many tmp.* files
* Monitor 8.X RMI server
* Monitor WebSphere Application server
* Anything else you can think of!
Requirements:
* Unix only - Runs on HP-UX, Solaris, AIX
LAWSON SOFTWARE DOES NOT SUPPORT LEM
License:
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License").
You may obtain a copy of the License at http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.
Free and Open Source Software - Sometimes you get what you don't pay for.
