Be secure with your data during FTP transactions.

Written by Tom Huntington

Do you feel like you have little control over the FTP processes that transfer data amongst your various systems in your network? Are these events coordinated, or do they happen whenever someone decides to send data? Do your night operators send data to other servers as part of their duties? Have you ever missed a critical milestone in your night processing because data was late?

Marketing wants Web analytics in a simple and modern view to validate campaigns.

Written by Floyd Del Muro

Perhaps your ISP gives you canned reports on Web site activity that don't show you what you need to know or don't offer very good historical reporting. Or perhaps you'd like a better way to do more in-depth or ad hoc analysis. If your organization would like to improve how it tracks, reports, and analyzes Web site activity, consider Help/Systems' SEQUEL for the task.

Save time by automatically opening tickets for hardware errors, job errors, application errors, security errors, device errors, backup errors, or software errors.

Written by Tom Huntington

Do your operators or help desk staff open problem tickets manually? Are there situations when opening these tickets automatically to cut time and effort would make sense?

Your business operations could be adversely affected by changes if you're not aware those changes happened.

Written by Donnie MacColl

For many system administrators, a big part of their IT team's challenge is to watch for critical changes that could impact business operations and report these back to the right people at the right time.

It depends on what kind of business you're running, but some examples might be stock levels falling below a critical level, or a share price falling or rising beyond a pre-set value, or the number of jobs or processes running in a critical ERP application at a specific time being less than what you expect.

Install IBM i over a Network File System (NFS) server using virtual optical media and enjoy the freedom of automation!

Written by Dan Boyum and Dave Snyder

The IBM i Network Install process uses virtual optical devices within a Network File System (NFS) network for installation. With new enhancements in IBM i 6.1, users now have the ability to perform installations and operating system upgrades across their networks to other IBM i partitions. In addition, users can also load PTFs or restore data via a Virtual Media Image (VMI), all without having to manually FTP the data to additional partitions. This huge advance in the IBM i installation realm will provide users with even more efficiency and flexibility in managing today's complex system environments.

Why should you use IBM i Network Install? It's quick, easy, and efficient.

Centralized remote logging can be directly utilized with Linux's built-in syslog logging facilities.

Written by Max Hetrick

An important part of Linux system administration is dealing with system logs. Even if you aren't watching or reading logs on a daily basis, when you're troubleshooting problems, logs are usually the very first thing you turn to when troubles arise. Having logs in one centralized location on a network simplifies the task of locating them, plus gives you one place to create backups of logs if desired. The default Linux logging facility, syslog, provides you with the basic tools necessary to send logs to a remote server for collection.

Early notification of missed processes is the key to staying on top of SLAs.

Written by Tom Huntington

One of my slogans is "little problems become big problems if left alone." When managing our service-level agreements (SLAs), we are concerned with notification and reporting that keeps us informed about the status of critical processes or an unknown event that can cause other processes to not finish on time.

Discover how easy it is to view Windows and UNIX logs from one central console.

Written by Tom Huntington

As we automate more and more of the data center, we realize that just because something is automated doesn't mean that we will never have to deal with it again. Eventually, some of these automated tasks are going to fail. When they fail, you need to be able to view the logs for these events. You may need to sign on to the server, and you may need to provide reports to your management team, too.