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A Window to the System i Soul

 

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Product: QSystem Monitor Company: CCSS (USA) Corp Version: 12 URL: www.ccssltd.com Overall Rating: 3.655

Pictures help. Whether you’re building a model, assembling a bicycle or watching sports results, one of the best ways to validate your data is visual inspection. A picture can be worth a thousand words—or in many cases, a thousand columns of numbers.

Many of us who play the stock market like to watch its events in real time, using some of the graphics and data presentation on a transaction-by-transaction basis on services like Yahoo. It’s fun to watch the data fly by.

As it is with the markets, so it is with watching what’s going on inside your system. Wouldn’t it be great to have a graphical explanation of the system-component trends affecting performance? This month, I look at QSystem Monitor from CCSS (USA) Corp (www.ccssltd.com).

Installation

In theory, you should be able to install the whole product from your desktop PC. It should load the PC side, then attempt an FTP to your IBM* System i* platform and install the rest of the product from there. This is designed to save you from wandering to wherever your system is housed (in some cases that’s across town or across the country). Well, the PC-side load went fine, but the installer couldn’t find the System i platform across the network. So I wandered over to it, popped the CD in the drive, punched up a LODRUN and was back in business.

After the installation, you need to complete some steps. Do this during a walkthrough with the tech support folks via an online meeting and you’ll be up and running faster.

Keep in mind, you can only do configuration changes from the green-screen sessions, not the GUI side. Nobody can give me a good reason why. Now, lest you get the idea that this is yet another green-screen package, it’s not. You won’t likely spend a lot of time on the green side—it just would have been nice to have one-stop configuration when on the GUI side as well.

Also, this product seems to work better if your System i platform is properly configured in your Microsoft* Windows* hosts file. At least that’s what tech support concluded during my installation.

Ease of Use

For the most part, this product is about as easy to use as an Excel spreadsheet. You’ll likely use the GUI side of the product for the more visually intuitive data representations from the graphs.

Documentation

The hard-copy documentation does a decent job of covering the System i side of the product. The Windows desktop side of the product’s documentation is in the help section.

 

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