• New GUI, Native SMS Come to Kisco’s iEventMonitor

  August 2, 2023 Alex Woodie

  There’s a lot going on inside your IBM i server – too much for a single administrator to track it all, let alone do so in real-time. One product that helps automate IBM i monitoring is iEvent Monitor from Kisco Systems. With the recent release of version 7, the company has added a new GUI, support for native SMS messaging, and monitoring for SQL security certificate expirations and thread waits, among other new features.

  Kisco Systems rolled out iEventMonitor back in 2015 as a budget-minded system monitoring tool for IBM i shops. Starting at just $400 for a single LPAR, …

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• Highly Secure API Enablement for IBM i

  August 1, 2022 Daniel Magid

  The explosive growth of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) over the past few years has dramatically transformed how business is conducted. APIs allow customers to increase revenue by leveraging new channels to reach their customers; they facilitate cost reduction by automating manual processes and raising an organization’s responsiveness. In many industries, the benefits of APIs are so compelling that it is already impossible to compete or participate in a business supply chain without supporting APIs.

  However, opening up your core IBM i applications to API connections also carries risks. According to the Gartner Group, APIs are rapidly becoming the number one …

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• Why Modernize Your Legacy Monitoring?

  April 25, 2022 Ash Giddings

  Modernization is everywhere at present, with teams actively looking to bring their business into the 21^st century by transforming applications, framework, underlying platform bases, and supporting software.

  The underlying aim of any modernization strategy will vary from business to business, although popular drivers include the need to become more agile in an effort to adapt quicker to the needs of the business, to improve efficiency, and to simplify operations. This exercise provides the opportunity to also free up resources and to address the impact of dwindling expertise, evident in many areas of the market.

  Certain to be included in …

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• Maxava Monitor Mi8 And The Cloud Fuels Expansion

  February 28, 2022 Ash Giddings

  Let’s face it – IBM i used to be an island. Set adrift from other platforms due to its loveable quirkiness and frequently managed by a separate team. It was often considered a real outlier. In recent years IBM has worked tirelessly to make IBM i running on Power Systems feel part of the mainstream server ensemble and is now thought by many as a normal server while managing to maintain what had previously made it unique.

  As a result, IBM i is now much more likely to be managed alongside other infrastructure than ever before. The green screen only …

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• Db2 PTF Group Enhancements Target Web Services, Audit Journal

  October 4, 2021 Alex Woodie

  It is indisputable that the Db2 for i database is the beating heart of the IBM i platform. There were no earthshattering enhancements to this database in the latest batch of Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.3 and 7.4 that IBM announced and shipped last month. But there were a few items worth mentioning that shipped in the Db2 PTF Group, including new HTTP commands for calling the database via REST and new SQL-based commands for querying the security audit journal.

  The top new Db2 for i feature arguably is the new set of functions for HTTP requests to consume …

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• Calling All IBM i Platforms. . .

  August 16, 2021 Daniel Magid

  In a microservices world, all elements of what used to be monolithic application programs are now chunks of code linked to each other using any number of application programming interfaces, or APIs. Those APIs can be based on a remote procedure call, or RPC, architecture, which is a kind of generic distributed client/server approach, or the REST – short for representational state transfer – architecture favored by parts of the commercial Web software stack that has dramatically grown in popularity in the past two decades. Either way – and in fact, there are more than two ways – APIs are …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 23, Number 24

  June 14, 2021 Doug Bidwell

  Don’t get hyper this week, but the big thing happening in IBM i Land is a set of high impact and pervasive, or HIPER, PTF patches to all four current variants of the IBM i operating system. There are also tweaks to storage PTFs and for the MQSeries message queueing middleware that runs on various platforms from Big Blue, including IBM i.

  Here is the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i release level:

  PTF Groups 7.4:

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)
  • Temporary Storage PTFs
  • MQ for IBM i – v9.0.0/v9.1.0/V9.2.0

  PTF Groups 7.3:

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)
  • Temporary Storage PTFs
  • MQ for

  …

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• Remain Buys MiWorkplace, Integrates It Into TD/OMS

  March 10, 2021 Alex Woodie

  In 2020, Remain Software quietly acquired MiWorkplace, a lightweight integrated development environment (IDE) for IBM i. Last month, the company announced that it has completed the integration of MiWorkplace into TD/OMS, its change management system for IBM i. It also rolled out new releases of TD/OMS, Remain API Studio, and Gravity.

  MiWorkplace is a Java-based IDE out of Germany that’s been building a user base among the IBM i customer base for a few years. The software, which runs on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux, was developed primarily to provide a better coding experience for SEU users, not as a …

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• Network Security: Don’t Trust And Verify

  October 21, 2020 Rich Loeber

  When your system is connected to a network, you cannot always guarantee the integrity of the person at the far end of a network connection. If your system is connected to the Internet, ethics go out the window altogether. You have to assume that the person at the far end is a bad guy, then proceed from there. With this tip, we’ll outline an approach to this problem that may help you to focus in on how to deal with the bad guys wherever they may be.

  Internet bad guys generally fall into two categories, sneaks and bullies. The bullies …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 28

  July 20, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  The action never stops here at the IBM i PTF Guide. Which is probably a good thing because if a platform isn’t being constantly updated, expanded, tweaked, and fixed, then it probably is not going to live for much longer in this fast-changing world. No one can say that about the IBM i platform. Nope.

  So for you security buffs, check this out. Security Bulletin: BIND for IBM i is affected by CVE-2020-8616 and CVE-2020-8617, which has an insanely long link buried here. The link above provides details, but the gist of it is also here by release: …

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