DRV Brings More Automation to IBM i Message Monitoring
June 22, 2022 Alex Woodie
Automation is the name of the game in IT today, particularly with the talent shortage gripping the industry and remote work becoming the norm. To that end, a new release of a message management solution from DRV Technologies that will enable IBM i shops to automate their responses to IBM i messages will likely be well received.
DRV Technologies develops a series of handy utilities for the IBM i server, including spool management and distribution (SpoolFlex), a forms management tool (FormFlex), secure MICR check printing (SecureChex), a database query and report writing tool (DBXFlex), and MessageFlex, a message monitoring solution.
MessageFlex works by continuously monitoring IBM i message queues for system and program messages. When a certain message appears, it can be configured to automatically notify operators or administrators by sending them emails, text message, or alerting them by other means.
With MessageFlex version 7.0, DRV has upped the degree of automation in several ways. For starters, it can automatically respond to specific messages completely on its own, eliminating the need for a human to be brought into the loop.
The new feature can be a time-saving device for responding to non-critical messages, according to Chris Burns, the vice president of sales at Duluth, Georgia-based company.
MessageFlex is DRV’s message monitoring automation solution for IBM i.
“Now we caution against that because typically when the ‘400 is giving you a message and telling you something is wrong, you should take a look at it,” he says. “But for some really minor stuff, like for a printer say, the software can answer it for you and take care of it.”
The IBM i server can be a chatty machine and generate messages for all sorts of things. By having MessageFlex weed out the less critical system and application messages, it can leave humans with more bandwidth to tackle more important tasks.
“It takes care of . . . message monitoring, which otherwise a system admin would have to be tasked with, and sometimes people don’t have a system admin,” Burns says.
Printers and their insatiable demand for toner, toner, more toner are often the culprits behind extraneous system messages. Burns relates the story of an IBM i admin who would get dozens of printer messages like that every day.
“So he set up a monitor to automatically monitor al the print queues, and if it ever encounters any of those messages, to automatically reply ‘just continue,’” Burns says. “It made his user base a much happier user base. ‘I don’t know what you did — my printer is always working!’ But at the same time, he’s at least aware. He can go in and look at it and see if something was wrong. Maybe he actually is low on toner.”
A related enhancement in version 7.0 is the capability for MessageFlex to automatically kick off a command or call an API when specific messages are encountered. Like the ability to automatically reply to system and application messages, this feature was developed at the request of DRV customers.
This new feature can be put to use in a variety of ways. For example, say a bank was running its end-of-day routine on its IBM i server to tabulate all the money coming in and the money going out. After receiving the message indicating all the evening’s batch jobs are done, MessageFlex could kick off another job in SpoolFlex to execute the report distribution process, Burns says.
“After the nightly backup, you created all these reports that normally would have gone to a printer,” he says. “We’re going to grab those reports, convert them to PDF, burst them into different branches, then put them out on a file server for archiving, or email them out to people who are supposed to receive it. So you can automate that process.”
Coordinating jobs among multiple systems can be difficult. Before triggering a job to execute on a remote server, it’s nice to know if the box is plugged in and functioning. To that end, DRV has added another feature with MessageFlex 7.0 called heartbeat monitoring.
The heartbeat monitor can be useful for company that’s getting ready to perform a backup or a role swap for disaster recovery or high availability purposes, Burns says.
“What happens if you have a system that’s on-premise but your backup system is five states away, and you’re ready to do a full system backup, but that other system for whatever reason is offline,” he says. “With the heartbeat function, you can set it up to literally ping the remote system to let it know that it’s available before the nightly backup or the system backup occurs. So it can kind of keep track of the other system.”
Finally, MessageFlex brings the ability for a user to group certain messages together. This will help the user by reducing the complexity involved when setting up the rules in MessageFlex. By grouping messages together, fewer sets of rules need to be managed.
This is another way that MessageFlex 7.0 bolsters automation, Burns says.
“You might have 10 different types of messages, and if any of these messages are encountered, I want it to contact Bob. If any of these five messages are detected to notify Janet, etc.,” Burns says. “So different kinds of messages can be grouped together, so you don’t have to set up separate monitors for each one.”
This release also brings the ability to monitor for actual CPU versus just the CPU percentage. This will be useful for admins who want to really dial in their configurations, Burns says.
“We have some people who are very granular. They want to know exactly what they’re looking at,” he tells IT Jungle. “For a lot of our customers, the IBM i is like their hot rod. They always want to keep it tuned perfectly and running like a champ.”
You can find more information on MessageFlex at the DRV website at www.drvtech.com.
