We are having some issues with slowness and CPS crashing or just becoming unresponsive. GE has suggest a few tools such as Solarwinds, WhatsUp, or Microsoft Systems Center to help with monitoring this situation but I am wondering if anyone has used these or have any other suggestions on a tool that has work for you?
For network device/server/traffic monitoring we use PRTG. You can monitor up to 100 nodes using their free version.
GE must have stock in each of those companies.
You could probably save a lot of money vs purchasing expensive tools (although admittedly pretty nice to have) by having a network engineer/analyst investigate. There are a lot of free and low cost network management tools out there as well.
As previously mentioned, PRTG can work very well in smaller environments. I think they may have increased the free metric count from 100 as well.
What's your environment? Remote desktop/Citrix/thin client, fat client, some of both? What are typical network latencies between problem sites and the JBoss and SQL server locations? Does that change when the slowness or crashes occur? That's just the tip of the iceberg on what needs evaluated.
We actually use the Database Performance Analyzer (DPA) by Solarwinds and we really like it. It has helped us to narrow down some serious slowdowns and other system performance issues and we have told GE about some of these details. Unfortunately, GE claims that they believe that our RAM is the issue and unfortunately we are in the process of a major infrastructure upgrade and will not have more RAM to throw at Centricity until after this upgrade which will take till about mid-summer. I am anxious, however, when we are finished with that upgrade and on the latest CPS12.2 version and still having these issues (because I'm sure we will) and then see how GE tries to pass it off.