Guest Blogger - GSX talks about Domino Domain Monitoring (DDM) and GSX Monitor
Tags :DDM GSX
Hello all-
Iread with much interest all comments about DDM, in response to my (previously published) article. I can only say that I fully agree with all these comments and I hope that this post will make things even clearer.
DDM is for sure an improvement and IBM kept improving the monitoring of Domino since version 4. Some DDM features are very useful and a few of them cannot be provided by any other product, including ours.
My article is actually not only regarding the benefits of DDM, Admins can judge by themselves about its value. What I can hardly understand is the marketing made by IBM around DDM. Was there so little to say about new features in Notes 7 that IBM chose to present DDM as a revolutionery product ? I do not question the value of DDM but all Admins having worked with Notes since R4 know that DDM is mainly a revamp of existing features.
I'm also surprised by IBM's plans of releasing a major release yearly. In my opinion, a major release must provide significant enhancements and new features. Fixing such deadlines leads to a very strange situation where 4 different versions of Notes are maintained, including the version 6.5 which nobody knows whether it can be considered as a major version or not.
The ones having discussed with me know that I'm a strong advocate of Notes for many years. However, I agree with Philip's comment about IBM competing with it's partners and I'll add that I'm puzzled by the lack of long term strategy in this company. I'd prefer that IBM spends its energy fighting with its competitors, not its partners. OK, I'll stop now before IBM people get mad at me once again.
Back to DDM, I don't like the design of this product:
1) It bypasses some standard Notes concepts, which is unacceptable to me:
- automated replication
- relies on Notes when it's supposed to monitor it
2) almost all information is not real time (unacceptable for a monitoring product)
3) it's mainly server based with all related drawbacks:
- resources taken from servers and possible crashes
- problems with heterogeneous environments (versions of monitoring code and servers)
4) real useful features are in my opinion reserved to skilled users
Comparing to Monitor:
1) Monitor doesn't have any of the drawbacks listed above
2) Monitor provides major additional features and supports other platforms (clusters, Sametime, BlackBerry, etc ... and soon Exchange)
In conclusion, I agree with someone's comment that DDM can be useful as a entry level monitoring tool but falls short for monitoring large (or critical) environments. As far as being a revolution in the Notes world ... let's be serious a minute, it's not. The real revolution happened about 20 years ago when the concepts of replication, UNID, certificates and views were put together to create Notes.
BTW - nice to see that quite a few people also use our products :-)
Kind regards
Philippe
Philippe Schlier
CITS - EMEAI
E-mail : pschlier@gsx.net
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GSX Groupware Solutions
Web site : http://www.gsx.net
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On Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 by Philippe Schlier
