Paging systems

[J.Pluta]

I thought I'd pose a little survey about AS/400 paging. Has anyone used any of the following: ICOM/400 from MBA ROBOT/CONSOLE from Help/Systems MessengerPlus from Bytware They seem to offer similar functionality, and seemingly similar prices (somewhere in the $2-3K range). Any ideas, comments or criticisms welcomed. Joe

[Guest.Visitor]

The company I'm consulting at uses MessagerPlus on all of their AS/400's. It works pretty well. You can setup paging groups and have each group paged when different messages occur. Most of the pagers used have alpha/numeric capabilities and the actual message is sent. They've also tried the two-way pagers, which worked, but they didn't like the pagers themselves.

[Guest.Visitor]

I use to work for a small company with only one 170. They used MessengerPlus, which worked well enough to alert you of program halts during the night. I didn't buy the full blown version, but what I did get was around $1200 or so, and did the job we needed it to. The company I work for now, has approx. a thousand 400's and uses Robot in conjunction with a 24 hour help desk.

[Guest.Visitor]

At my company we use the ROBOT suite from Help Systems. Console with Alert is very reliable. The whole suite of applications is excellant, I highly recommend them.

[Guest.Visitor]

I've had real good experiences with ROBOT.

[Guest.Visitor]

Joe, I know it isnt on your list, but we use LXIpage from LXI. It is in the price range you mentioned and has lots of functionality. We have written hooks into its api so we can send messages to a given message queue and cause pages to groups of people based on the data content of the message. We have tied it into our websphere servlets so we get pages when a servlet is unhappy (ie sql not responding ...). We are also using it to monitor dasd utilization, high cpu utilization, and whether or not certain neps (neverending processes) are still running. You can also specify remediation before sending a page. For example, if you monitoring whether or not a given comm line is active, you can have lxi vary the line off/on and wait a few minutes before sending out a page. Very helpful. Our code hooking into LXI's apis is rather simple, and the software runs like clockwork. I have it on two as/400s right now. Alex Garrison

[Guest.Visitor]

We use MessengerPlus and it works very well. Simple to use and very stable. Steve