Chapter 1, Getting Started

Getting Started Introduction

 SCO Doctor is an automated facility which relieves you of routine systems management tasks, optimizes system performance, and protects you from unexpected and costly crises. System administrators know accurate diagnosis is essential to effective systems management. To address this need, SCO Doctor incorporates a powerful Inference Engine which ensures that SCO Doctor not only recognizes a problem but accurately diagnoses its cause before notifying you and taking appropriate corrective action.

The four principle elements of the SCO Doctor system are:

These elements ensure that SCO Doctor intelligently and unobtrusively monitors your system's performance day and night.


Views and Reports

SCO Doctor's Views and Reports allow you to consult doctor whenever you wish to observe, assess and analyze accumulated data and plan for the future. Both are presented in a variety of tabular or graphical representations including:

There is an extensive list of report and view options to choose from. The doctor interface will automatically select the most natural presentation format for any view you select. However, should this not suit, you may select an alternative. Specialized desktops are also provided for both expert and introductory levels.

Views are an integral part of the SCO Doctor solution. Each provides an insight into one facet of your system's performance. If you have a performance problem, views allow you to drill down toward it, starting with a general system overview, and then home in on the problem. Views also enable you to compare and contrast current system performance with past behavior.

Rather than merely presenting raw management statistics, doctor will interpret the data and diagnose your system in plain language.


Alerts

The doctor interface ensures that you are always in touch with what it is observing and doing, on your behalf. Whenever your system is performing abnormally or approaching pre-determined thresholds, SCO Doctor will trigger an Alert.

An alert is the indication that something of note is occurring on the system. Each alert has been pre-configured to monitor one or more system parameters, and immediately notify you of an anomaly via an Alert Notice. An alert notice is posted to your screen in a pop-up window and contains details of that alert and often, a recommended remedy. Alert notices may appear on your screen as soon as they occur, be allowed to accumulate in an Alert Notice Queue until you wish to collect them or you may request urgent alerts to immediately notify you by email or pager.


Action Programs

In addition to notifying you of the problem, an alert may also activate an Action Program. An action program is designed to take corrective measures in response to the problem signaled by an alert. SCO Doctor includes a standard set of alerts and action programs which may be used as supplied, or modified to suit your system's particular needs. All action programs utilize the TCL embedded programming language. You also have the option of running any user or system process as an action program.


Relational Database

Alerts are triggered in response to information gleaned from over 180 system parameters including; CPU, Memory, Disk, File Systems, Network Communications, TCP/IP and NFS, Network Interfaces, Software and Hardware Configuration and SNMP data. An additional module monitors the status of all system configuration files and allows you to capture third party data sources. All of this data is stored in Relational Databases which are readily accessed via the doctor graphical interface.

By default, doctor will automatically connect to a live system whenever you run this interface. As you accumulate data, you have the option to open historical databases or log files of saved data.

The doctor interface also incorporates tools for program and sub-system management. This operations management capability is fully integrated with the system data monitoring facilities, and is available over a LAN or WAN.