Hi,

I just upgraded to the most recent beta and I haven't noticed any problems. I was 
shocked that the upgrade worked so smoothly. I'm using Big Sister[1] along with 
Servers Alive so I already had RRDtool installed. With some minor exceptions, setting 
up RRDtool was straightforward and I was generating graphs within a few minutes.

The exceptions were pretty minor. I couldn't find any documentation on RRDtool support 
(not surprising for beta code features and to be fair I didn't look too hard) so it 
took a minute or two to figure out to run the RRD creation script. I made the mistake 
of setting my RRD directory to C:\Program Files\SAlive\rrd_db because the batch file 
choked on the space in the path (spaces need quoting or escaping) but I worked around 
that by reconfiguring to use c:\rrd\salive instead. I had RRDtool installed somewhere 
under c:\bin\rrdtool rather than c:\Program Files\rrdtool and IIRC I put it there 
because of that same spaces-in-the-path-name problem.

Anyway, I'm extremely happy with Servers Alive, especially now that I've got RRDtool 
support, saweb, and ps-over-ssh process monitoring on our linux boxes (via the 
External COM test.) About the only thing I could ask for is a %-uptime metric over 
some interval but I haven't rummaged through the new version or mailing list enough to 
know if that's already been planned, implemented, or dismissed.

Again, many thanks!

-- Bob

PS: For those of you in educational institutions cursed with maintaining
Blackboard, I have an external tester for the Bb 6 login process
(end-to-end, login through logout) so you can detect when your app
servers wedge despite the application appearing to respond. Also, if
there's any interest, I can finish my LDAP tester (both in properly
formatted and documented perl.)

[1] Win32 port of clone of Big Brother. Upsides: the code is written in perl, it's 
mostly platform-neutral, it's protocol-compatible with Big Brother, and it's released 
under the GPL. Downsides: it's only slightly less irritating to configure than Big 
Brother, the code base is kind of a mess, it's unreliable under Win32, and it isn't 
nearly as well-supported as Big Brother. At this point I'd recommend Servers Alive for 
those dedicated to Win32, otherwise Nagios (ex-NetSaint) if you've got some time and 
unix expertise.
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