We posted an article showing you how to configure data source names (DSNs) for our ODBC event monitor when FrameFlow is running on a 64-bit version of Windows. Windows doesn’t make it obvious that you need to use a different ODBC administrator that is not easy to find.
See our technical resources section for this article and many others as well:
http://www.frameflow.com/support/resources/
FrameFlow’s ODBC event monitor is a great solution for monitoring all kinds of databases since almost all databases include ODBC support. For SQL Server, Oracle and MySQL, FrameFlow offers dedicated event monitors and we recommend using them instead as they offer additional options and database compatibility.
We’ve updated the status of Project Cumulus. Project Cumulus will deliver a new event monitor designed to keep you up to date on the status of your Amazon EC2 instances. It alerts you about instance status changes, configuration changes and gathers monitoring data for all your instances automatically.
Originally scheduled for a mid-summer release, we’ve moved it up and it will be included in v6.8 which is only a few weeks away. Version 6.8 will also include Project Grid (new dashboarding abilities), Project Strato (new Cloud Alert options for FrameFlow MSP) and a lot of other great new features and functionality.
Along with the next version of FrameFlow we’ll be releasing an updated version of our mobile client. The new version will add support for FrameFlow MSP and will be available both for iOS and for Android.
The next release will be v6.8 and it scheduled for release towards the end of May. It will include a great new dashboard type (Project Grid), performance improvements and several brand new event monitors.
Development on Project Strato is now complete and we’ve updated it on our home page, setting its status to “Pending Release”.
Project Strato is for FrameFlow MSP, our multi-site monitoring solution for Managed Service Providers and distributed organizations. It extends our Cloud Alert feature so it can alert you by SMS text message or voice telephone call if your installation has lost contact with any remote site.
Cloud Alert is our new hosted service that lets you deliver alerts by SMS text message or voice phone call using text-to-speech translation. It’s a really great way to deliver alerts for critical situations.
If you haven’t yet tried Cloud Alert, drop us a note at support@frameflow.com and we’ll be happy to send you an evaluation key for it.
There’s an issue in the setup for FrameFlow MSP v6.7 that may affect you when you are installing new remote nodes.
On the very last page of the setup and configuration there is an option to launch the web interface. Of course all management of remote nodes is done from the master console so the remote node doesn’t have a web interface.
The check box is deselected by default but if you select it and press “Finish” the configuration utility will hang. To work around this, just leave the option off and then press the Finish button.
And if you have accidentally selected it, that’s no problem. The remote node setup is already complete at that point and you can safely use the Windows Task Manager to close the config utility. We’ll get this fixed in the next maintenance release.
We’ve been busy working on new content for our web site and you’ll likely notice some differences. With the release of v6.7 and our new Cloud Alert service we gave each product its own top level section. Common functionality is found in sets of links with the title “Learn More About FrameFlow And…”. There’s a lot of great content there and even experienced FrameFlow users might find some cool new features that they didn’t know about.
We’ve also been adding more videos and technical articles.
The first videos are introductory ones helping people who are new to FrameFlow to jump start their monitoring configuration. We’ll be adding a lot more and soon will be covering advanced topics. If there are topics that you are particularly interested in then let us know.
Our list of technical articles is growing. We recently added articles for troubleshooting problems related to Windows performance counters and for regaining accessing to the FrameFlow interface for those rare conditions when another app steals our port number after a system restart.
FrameFlow v6.7 has been released!
We’ve added an awesome new Virtual Command Line feature that gives you command line access to your systems without ever leaving the FrameFlow interface.
We’ve added a brand new offering called Cloud Alert that lets you send alerts by voice and/or SMS text message without having to purchase a modem.
We’ve expanded our API, adding new methods that let you tap into even more of the data collected by our software.
We’ve added support for using Office365 for e-mail notifications.
And along the way we made tons of smaller updates and fixed reported issues.
Licensed users can log in at our site to download the new release. If you’re in the evaluation phase you can just download again from our web site. In either case our setup program will handle the upgrade while preserving all of your settings and configuration.
Our internet is down due to a botched upgrade by our telecom provider. They’re working on it and we expect to be back online by the early afternoon. We’ve had to reschedule a few support calls and we’re doing our best through other arrangements. We’ve still got access to e-mail so for urgent issues drop us a note at support@frameflow.com and we’ll do our best to get back to you quickly.
FrameFlow includes the ability to tell event monitors that they depend on other event monitors in the system. It’s a powerful way to control alerting and avoid redundant notifications. It came up recently in our forums but it’s a feature that not everyone knows about so we thought we would highlight it here in our blog.
Dependencies allow you to control the running of one event monitor based on status of another event monitor.
Let’s say you have a Ping event monitor checking 50 different devices and you have a Drive Space event monitor checking the same 50 devices. If a system is down, by default both event monitors will alert you about it. Instead you can set the Drive Space event monitor to depend on the Ping event monitor and use the “Match by event monitor and device” option. Then when the Drive Space event monitor runs it will check each of its 50 devices to see what the Ping event monitor most recently reported. It will skip any devices that failed the ping check.
The “Match by event monitor only” is useful in a different case. Let’s say you have a VPN connection to a remote office and you are monitoring 50 systems at the remote location using a Drive Space event monitor. If your VPN router goes down, by default you’ll get 50 notifications from the Drive Space event monitor because it won’t be able to reach any of the remote systems. Instead you can set up an event monitor to watch the router (using perhaps a Ping event monitor or an SNMP event monitor). Then you can set your Drive Space event monitor to depend on the router event monitor and use “Match by event monitor only”. Then when Drive Space event monitor runs it will check the status of the router event monitor. If it is in a failed state then it will not try to reach any of the 50 devices on the other side until the router event monitor returns to a success state.
We encourage you to take advantage of the dependency feature and if you have any further questions about it, just drop us a note.
FrameFlow Support
support@frameflow.com
The holiday season is catching up on us quickly and a few of the projects we had hoped to release before the end of the year are going to stretch out to January instead. Project Commando will deliver a really cool integrated command line environment that will let you perform command line operations on remote systems without ever leaving the FrameFlow interface. We’ve moved its estimate release date to late January to coincide with the release of a few other projects under way.
Project Nimbus will also ship towards the end of January. This project will deliver an amazing new option for notifications. We’re keeping it partly under wraps for now but some more details will emerge in January when we’ll be looking for beta testers. If you’ve ever wanted to get notifications by SMS text message or voice telephone calls, but it’s been too much of a pain to get approval for the right kind of modem, then we’ll soon have a solution for you.
A new project has been added to our list. Project Throttle is going to put an end to a classic problem that affects all monitoring systems: Floods of alerts when a critical network component goes down. We already have dependencies and multiple notification options but this project will deliver an elegant solution that works really well with the other available options.
So stay tuned for a big release at the end of January. We’re moving quickly and hope to squeeze in some other amazing items too.
FrameFlow Support
support@frameflow.com
