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, the product provided a no-frills approach to monitoring of key metrics of the IBM i server, including QSYSOPR and QSYSMSG, undercutting more elaborate products from bigger vendors.
While the price has come up a bit from 2015, the functionality has grown, too. Today, iEventMonitor can monitor multiple IBM i data sources in real time and issues alerts according to a configurable rules engine. Data sources include the security audit journal, message queues, history logs, and operating system values. Alerts can be sent as break messages, as emails, SMS messages, or added to a SIEM (security information and event management) feed. It can even be configured to run user exit programs, and there’s an optional Web service that allows users to send remote responses.
Image courtesy Kisco
A new graphical user interface (GUI) will greet users of iEventMonitor 7.0. Dubbed Bluescape, Kisco’s clean-looking new GUI template is making its way into all of its products. It started with the launch of iFileAudit 8.0 last year, and now iEventMonitor is the latest to get the Bluescape treatment.
Bluescape makes accessing iEventMonitor features easy for anybody familiar with a Web browser, but doesn’t take away any functionality that 5250 users have become used to, says Kisco owner Justin Loeber.
“You can now use 100 percent of the product through a browser-based interface. No green-screen required,” Loeber said in a recent webinar on iEventMonitor 7. “Both green-screen and our Bluescape UI have the complete same functionality, so you don’t sacrifice anything depending on what you use. But it’s there and it’s really the future of product development at Kisco, is to move more and more of the admin workload into the Web browser.”
This release also brings native support for Short Messaging Service (SMS) via an integration with Twilio, a popular SMS provider. The SMS support is delivered via an add-on product called kConnect, which is a new API integration tool that Kisco launched earlier this year. kConnect requires IBM i 7.3.
Native SMS support is useful because it allows users to bypass the Simple Mail Transport Protocol (SMTP)-to-text services that have become less reliable over the years, Loeber said.
“We have found, as time moves on, there have been more and more e-mail deliverability issues in the support queue for iEvent Monitor and our other products to the point where we decided we wanted to do something to bypass SMTP if we could for mobile alerting,” he said.
“The impression we got was that the mobile carriers were getting more strict on which messages they would accept for mobile-to-text conversation, and many of the carriers were starting to require configuration changes to public DNS [Domain Name Service], and we had customers who didn’t want to get involved in having to change their public DNS just to send their IBM i lists,” Loeber said. Gmail accounts, specifically, have experienced the most number of problems, he said.
Kisco’s new Bluescape GUI provides a Web browser-based experience for iEventMonitor users.
Version 7.0 also brings several new pre-canned monitor, including one for expiring Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates. This new feature, which Loeber said emerged from a breakfast meeting he had with Alan Seiden a few months ago, enables an administrator to get an alert when an SSL certificate is about to expire. Users can set the number of days of warning they want before the SSL certificate expires.
The new thread wait monitor gives administrators a heads-up when an application is stuck in a thread-wait state. It may or may not indicate a problem, Loeber said. “But like some of the other performance monitors in iEventMonitor, if iEventMonitor detects a persistent state, it will fire an alert . . . as that could indicate there’s a problem with the job.”
Similarly, the new monitor for user profile expiration gives the admins a notice that a user profile is about to expire, potentially locking out a user and eating up help desk hours.
iEventMonitor can also now monitor secure socket network connections in the security journal. This is a more advanced feature, and requires making some configuration changes to the IBM i server. Specifically, it requires enabling the *NETSECURE feature in the audit journal. Once it’s activated, iEventMonitor can be used to capture socket level activity including data about TLS protocol and cipher usage, Kisco says.
“This is a big one. There’s a lot of detail in this in these secure sockets records in the IBM i audit journal,” Loeber said. “This came from a customer request where they were looking for a means of detecting when an outdated TLS version or an outdated cipher suite was being used in HTTPS connections to their server.”
Kisco is looking to build on its access to secure sockets data, and it’s looking for more customer input, he added.
Lastly, Kisco has added a way to automate the log purge function. Customers can now specify the number of days they want to go in between log purges.
Development of iEventMonitor continues, and the company is already up to version 7.03. During the webinar, Loeber provided a sneak peek at what’s coming down the pike in the iEventMonitor roadmap.
One of those is a job schedule watch to detect which jobs that were expected to run failed to run. Kisco has also had a request to develop a sort of heartbeat monitor. IFS monitoring is another area of active development for the iEventMonitor team.
Finally, Kisco is looking to develop or hook into a dashboard solution, which would allow enterprises with a lot of LPARs to see important events across a single screen. Kisco does not want to get into the dashboard building business, Loeber said, and so the company is looking at how it can leverage enterprise dashboard standards, such as Grafana.
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Tags: Tags: IBM i, iEventMonitor, Kisco Systems, Secure Sockets Layer, SQL, SSL
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