MonitorWare Agent Preview Released

Erftstadt, Germany, 2001-09-28.

Adiscon GmbH today announced the immediate availability the 0.8 preview release of the MonitorWare Agent. This is the first publicly available MonitorWare Agent release.

"The MonitorWare Agent will be our flagship system monitoring product.", says president Rainer Gerhards. "I am glad interested customers can now have a sneak preview of what is coming." The 0.8 Preview release is not feature complete. New features will be introduced before the final release.

To learn more about MonitorWare's design, we have decided to include an excerpt from Rainer Gerhards' letter to beta testers. We hope this information is helpful.

COMPLETE REWRITE

As you can see the preview's functionality bases on the current EventReporter and WinSyslog products. HOWEVER, all product parts have been completely rewritten to offer highest performance and flexibility. One goal was to enable us to include new additions into the engine quickly. We are very confident to have reached that goal. This enables us to move quickly from now on.

For those of you operating high volume logging environments, the MonitorWare Agent is specifically designed to handle *large* bursts of incoming messages without any packet loss. We are now running with a multitude of finely-optimized internal threads.

MICROSOFT .NET

We very thoroughly investigated the .NET platform. We believe this platform will be a strong player in the future and provide added benefits to customers. HOWEVER, after our intense testing, we do NOT believe that .NET is at this time the right choice for building high performance, low impact monitoring agents. There are a number of issues, one of them is that .NET requires Microsoft Internet Explorer installed on the machine (and this in a recent version). It also has a much larger memory and processing time footprint. As such, we have decided to continue to develop the agent (the NT service) in high performance native C++. This decision will last for a long time.

On the client side, we do not see that many problems with .NET. In fact, we see a number of immediate advantages here. Thus, we have decided that the clients - specifically the not yet available enterprise client - will be based on the .NET tools. Because all of the .NET solutions are currently in beta only, we will provide the MonitorWare Configuration Client as a VB 6 project. Later versions will be moved to .NET as soon as market permits. The Enterprise Console will most probably be developed in .NET natively.

WINDOWS XP AND .NET SERVERS

Another major player, we took into deep consideration and analysis. We already developed and tested the product under this environment. The final Agent release will most probably be Windows XP optimized but run fine on all other Windows NT platforms, too.

IMPROVED PROBABILITY OF LINUX SUPPORT

Due to public demand, we are currently very closely considering porting the service to Linux. It is not on top of the features list and will be re-evaluated after launching the initial final release. We expect to have at least limited monitoring functionality for Linux systems. As far as the Linux variant is involved, we will most probably support the Red Hat distribution.

The MonitorWare Agent 0.8 Preview releease is a free download found at our web site. Interested users should download and try out the version. Though it is a preview, it is fully supported. Support questions should be addressed to support@adiscon.com.