Admin-Scout 2.2 - Ready for Informix 14.10

Important features for cluster configuration and better analysis of instances in a group

Overview:

Informix Control Center (ICC) - Dashboard, new tabs and additional tooltips.
Better overview of Informix instances of a group.
Detailed overview of Informix cluster configurations.
Visualization without Adobe Flash (separate article).
New SQL editor with syntax highlight (separate article).
InformixHQ - Memory Requirements.

Admin-Scout 2.2 - Now 100% Adobe Flash free!

The CURSOR Service Distribution will release the new Admin-Scout Version 2.2 in March 2019.
The Admin-Scout 2.2 is the first release that is delivered without any Adobe Flash modules.

Gießen, 22 February 2019

For years, Adobe Flash was the first choice to visualize animations and sophisticated graphics in a browser. Due to recurring security issues, the use of Adobe Flash Player has long been discouraged. The IBM Informix OpenAdmin Tool also uses the Adobe Flash Player in some areas for the graphical representation of complex contexts.

Security warnings and the end of support for the Adobe Flash Player, already announced for 2020, prompted us early on to switch the graphical interface of the Admin-Scouts to the Dojo Toolkit and HTML5. We have step by step converted all relevant modules. This involved the redesign of all charts and the elaborate redesign of important modules such as the SQL-Trace or the Storage-Module.

Admin-Scout 1.4.4 - the new dashboard, an overview

The Admins-Scout Dashboard is an extremely powerful and informative tool that gives you an overview of the state of your Informix servers

The Admin-Scout Dashboard is the central overview for important parameters and states.
All Informix servers in a group are listed and the status of a server is displayed with icons.
The details of an instance are very useful for troubleshooting or for identifying optimization potentials. For example, it is very easy to find tables where indexes are missing or the index structure is not ideal.
In contrast to the OAT, the Admin-Scout offers the possibility to switch between the tabs - without waiting times and without having to start the reporting from the beginning.

This article describes the Admin-Scout Dashboard and its individual sections.

Admin-Scout 1.4.4 - DBSpaces and Storage Report

An Admin-Scout feature for fast analysis of DBSpaces

DBSpaces - key data and workload at a glance
shows access, page I/O, read and write times
view details down to single a database
drill-down information down to chunk level
DBSpace history data for storage planning
The Admin-Scout Storage Report provides a basic overview of all DBSpaces.

About Admin-Scout development

CURSOR Informix Support employees have more than twenty years of experience in supporting and administering Informix databases. We have been developing the Admin-Scout since mid-2015 and the first customer installations took place in 2016.

This was preceded by a set of tools (scripts) that we developed and used to support Informix installations in 24x7 support. In order to bundle our tools under a uniform interface, they were integrated into the Informix OpenAdmin Tool as "CURSOR Plug-Ins". The Informix OAT was a well-known platform through which we could make the CURSOR plug-ins available to Informix administrators in general.

In the meantime the Admin Scout has developed into a stand-alone appliance where nothing reminds of the Informix OAT.

A reworked user interface, significantly new functions - such as the Admin-Scout Dashboard - and new concepts for alerting and data security have been added. There is hardly an area that has not been revised by CURSOR Informix Support. This is especially visible in the replacement of Adobe Flash in the OAT interface or the introduction of an SQL editor with syntax highlighting.

With the release 2.2, from March 2019, the Admin-Scout will only be provided on the basis of the Dojo Framework with HTML5 and without Adobe-Flash.

In the Admin-Scout developer blog we present some new features as articles. A good overview of the enhancements can be found in the article Development and Release Steps, in which we also give a preview of the features of the next version