To whom it may concern:

At HDX we evaluated a number of automation tools, and selected Logs and SPS/Alerts Manager. There were a number of reasons we chose SPS.

1. Ease of use
2. Efficiency (amount of CPU required)
3. Flexibility
4. Price/performance

Our goal was to provide support for our Stratus System, and a network of 300 remote clients. We had a mandate to get outside the usual mold in support of hiring a large number of telephone drones, and depend upon support to be client driven. We were looking for a very high degree of automation, and hopefully less Support employees.

At the time I was the only person at our Company supporting our Stratus system. I was looking for a tool that could be used to both, send out alerts and automatically initiate recovery in an outage. By monitoring the system error log, the Netx disk logs, and some file that get transferred to the Stratus every hour from remote sites, I am able to not only monitor the Stratus, but the status of our gateway PC's in over 300 client sites around the country.

The target goal, was to have our Stratus system up and available to our clients 99.99% (24 x 7) and have our clients Gateway PC's available 95% (24 x 7). We have made the target goal on the Stratus hands down, the Gateway PC's have averages 93% availability. As it turns out OS2 takes longer to reboot than I projected, and since we automatically reboot the PC's during the month the original target is unobtainable. At this time SPS intervenes and corrects 97% of client outages before the client knows there is a problem.

In summary, I found SPS LAMS to be very easy to install, and efficient is its execution. I have not come up against a situation where I could not use LAMS to automate either the alert on a problem or the recovery from a problem. I am currently in the process of having LAMS issue commands to stop and start programs on our remote OS2 PC's to recover from discovered error conditions that at this time require a pager alert and manual intervention by a support person.

If I can be of any assistance please feel free to contact me at any time.

Rod Childs

(610) 219-1693
Rod.Childs@HDX.COM