Time For New Phone

My phone contract is up and I want to replace my iPhone 4 with something new. I was going to just replace it with an iPhone 5 but with TSMManager having an Android app for mobile administration I am tempted to move to a Galaxy S III. I have even considered a Galaxy Note 2. I have 3 Android tablets and I am very familiar with ColckworkMod Recovery and playing with different devs. Any suggestions are welcome.

TSMManager 4.1

Back in June of 2005 I posted a review of TSMManager 4.0. When I was with IBM I had convinced management to purchase the product and we got a sweetheart deal to boot. I was initially drawn to the nice admin console window. As you'll see in the picture below when you open an admin console you are presented with a tabbed window that has a number of different views, one per tab. The first tab is the ALL MESSAGES tab that is basically an active view of the TSM servers activity log. The second tab is the most useful and important tab within TSMManager, in fact it is what makes TSMManager my favorite tool to use. This tab is the ERROR MESSAGES tab and it basically filters the TSM activity log to show only WARNING, ERROR, and SEVERE ERROR messages. Why is this the most important piece to TSMManager? Because, with this one tab 95+% of the time I can deduce a problem within in a minute or two. For example in the provided screen shot you can see we had a number of drive errors, but look closer and you see it's one tape causing the problem. This took me a minute to figure out and I easily resolved it by removing the tape. The next tab I rarely use but it can come in handy. It is the SPECIAL MESSAGES tab and it covers ALL the servers not just the one you have selected to manage at the moment. It really lists the processes and there start and end times. You might use the tab to lookup processes and how they ran, but I haven't found a real use for this tab yet. The next tab is the actual TSM Admin command line. You can issue commands or use the quick commands provided on the side. TSMManager will store the last 20+ commands in a buffer for recall. Overall this window and its tabs are worth the cost of the product in its productivity enhancement.

This is the error tab. Click on it and you'll see how it consolidates all errors into a simple interface. Great for those times you're having server issues. 

TSMManager

Well, we have been using TSMManager for some time now and I have to say I rely on it a lot for day to day monitoring of our servers. Our environment is pretty large so we need something that will allow us to see problems quickly and easily. TSMManager has a slew of tools and the interface is fairly easy to use. We have a number of Jr. level admins who are able to handle multiple TSM servers with TSMManager's help. The key piece of TSMManager is the administrators console. It is a tabbed interface that allows me to see things at a glance without having to query the activity log in search of the problem. The first tab is basically the admin interface running in console mode. The second tab is the greatest gift to admin in that it is an error tab. It parses out the errors and shows all warnings, errors, and severe errors.


This is the error tab. Click on it and you'll see how it consolidates all errors into a simple interface. Great for those times you're having server issues. 

TSMManager (Cont.)

When not checking for errors the majority of your time will be spent using the Admin tab. The admin tab allows for entering in TSM commands and you'll notice down the upper left side of the window there are preset queries you can issue to the TSM server you have selected. Below the preset commands you'll see the list of the servers you have defined the to TSMManager collector and a simple click on the server you wish to monitor and enter commands for switches the ENTIRE console to that machine. It's instantaneous and you can immediately select the other tabs to see what is happening on your server or enter commands to query for yourself. Another nice feature you can see in the picture below is the ability to save commonly used commands and queries and select them from the drop down list whenever you wish to use them.


Here we have the admin command line and stored and preset commands.

TSMManager is not DB based so it has a few limitations. We have noticed with it monitoring 30 large TSM servers that the collector will have issues with the dsmadmc executables failing (TSMManager opens a dsmadmc on the collector server for each TSM server it is monitoring up to 30 servers per collector). This could be the host server it is running on, but other than that the product has been a godsend to our workload and daily monitoring. I would recommend it for shops with limited TSM skills and those that require the end users ability to monitor backup. It has e-mailing and alert capabilties, individual TSM server reports, consolidated server reports (combines the info for all TSM servers monitored by TSMManager), and even has a DRM/tape management feature for those without DRM. With TSMManagers admin web interface you can monitor you systems and it also allows the end users to log in to a secure client website that will allow them READONLY access to reports and results of server backups. I have had to use it a number of times to make our DBA's and application owners feel more secure with their system's backups and it works very well. There are numerous other features within TSMManager, but just the ones I've mentioned so far make it worth the price of purchase. If you feel like TSM is causing you the onset of early stage dementia check out TSMManager you'll be happy you did.