VISUAL MESSAGE CENTER - USER MANUAL  

Tango/04's VISUAL Message Center is an AS400 software package that provides an incredibly easy way to cope with real-time Systems Management and Monitoring needs of complex IT environments or for under-staffed/under-skilled IT departments. VMC monitors, manages and notifies (AS400 messaging) operators in real time of any critical event, performance issue, security breach or application problem that could impact the operating health of your iSeries (AS400) systems or partitions, Windows servers and even networked devices and services such as, printers, routers, your corporate website or email. Plus, VMC's problem solving tools can save you more time and money than any any other solution on the market.

Want to minimize downtime and automate operations management tasks? Visual Message Center constantly monitors all your systems and services for critical events, and provides 100% GUI for all system management and support tasks. When important AS400 messages are received, it can alert operators or respond automatically by running an Action Set - so problems can be avoided before your business is affected. 

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     - Monitor all or selected message queues (including interactive external queues) and be able to see every detail concerning the message or event.
     - Ensure your Security policy is being respected.
     - Monitor and respond to ALL interactive error messages from one location or remotely with your preferred mobile device with no additional overhead.
     - Pinpoint bottlenecks of Jobs with Performance Issues and take immediate corrective actions with a click of a button or automate the correction.
     - Freeze selected end user sessions when interactive errors occur, see up to the last key stroke, and take over their key board.
     - Customize error alerts - SMS Device, pager, email, pop-up window, etc.
     - Automate iSeries and PC system commands for corrective actions.
     - Automate complex message responses - reply to messages, configure alternative responses and more.
     - Be the first to know about your operation's and solve system management problems before they affect the business!

Visual Message Center can address all your Enterprise's Systems Management concerns and Automate most of the work for you, simply and fast.

MONITORING - ensures critical processes are always running as required, on time, without errors, and without impacting performance for other system processes. VMC can monitor specific iSeries jobs or groups of jobs, automate iSeries commands to be run in response, trigger complex message response, and/or alert you in "Real-Time":
     - Error Messages - Monitor any number of any message queues, including system message queues (i.e. QSYSOPR), dynamic message queues and third-party application messages.
     - Job Activity - Monitor the activity of specific jobs at any time and get alerted to potential problems
     - Job Status - Detect and react to jobs in erroneous state (i.e. MSGW, INEL, LCKW).
     - Job Queue Status - Get detailed information on critical job queues at any time, including number of jobs in release status and the status of the queue itself.
     - Device Status - Monitor specific devices, controllers and lines (i.e. Ethernet lines, printers, fax servers, etc.) with full error code and diagnostic information retrieval.
     - Network - Monitor all message queues, operating status and specific events

Monitor messages, events, critical jobs, application errors, hardware devices, network configuration changes and third-party iSeries applications with automated corrective actions and alerting.

SUPPORT - Visual Support Pro lets you see every thing you ever could possibly want to know about any iSeries Job, including both interactive and batch jobs for both local and remote users, using 5250 emulation or PC emulators.
     - See real user name, IP address, user profile details
     - See Running (or last executed) SQL statement (discover what?s really going on at these Client/Server and WebSphere jobs) 
     - Allows you to inspect and change internal job information like the library list, QTEMP objects, local data area (LDA), variable values, open files, spool files (being created with actual content), full 'Work with Job' information and full DSPJOB listing from a graphical interface.
     - Allows you to browse the source of the running program (and in most cases, even with the line that is being executed and highlights the executing statement)
     - Allows you to browse the application structure, evaluate variables, and much more
     - Execute any command on a captured job even when it is in input inhibited mode (if its failing) including changing, adding or removing libraries from the library list, the local data area, variable values, or dump, update or delete QTEMP objects, debugging the job, and more.
     - Its Program Navigator and Application Explorer allows you to see how each program relates to one another, knowing the external invocation tree, and all the objects referenced by each program, saving you time and avoids mistakes by allowing you to see and navigate program source code, file definitions, data dictionaries, or any other related information of any object used by simple point and click simplicity.
     - VSP lets you see the end-users screen up to the very last key stoke, with their key-board control.

SECURITY AND AUDITING - Internally protects and prevents unauthorized access to data and audits system data and object use, with automated preventive actions and alerting. Detects: 
     - Changes and access to objects (delete, copy, rename, restore, authority change, read, edit)
     - Creation or modification of user profiles
     - Changes to system auditing, system values
     - Authority failures
     - Programs changed to adopt authority, users obtaining adopted authority and profile swapping
     - Commands run by suspect user profile
     - Use of sensitive commands
     - Use of Dedicated Services Tools
     - And much more!

PERFORMANCE MONITORING AND AVAILABILITY ASSURANCE - provides "Real-Time" performance monitoring of your systems, applications, networked services and devices allowing operators to pinpoint the precise cause of any slowdowns that will affect your business processes or automate corrective actions.
     - CFINT - avoid abusive interactive jobs from affecting other jobs on your system 
     - Justify upgrades - use convincing graphs and charts to illustrate performance needs
     - Analyze historical performance metrics and see bottle neck trends and growth needs clearly
     - Monitor key performance metrics (CPU use by job type, user, job, system, partition, etc. / Disk use %, total, ASP, system, etc. / Response time maximum, average, interval grouping / Memory pools' page faults, memory per job, etc / and much more
     - Host type - Check any type of host, regardless of operating systems or device type.
     - IP or DNS - Use IP or DNS addresses
     - POP3 email server - Check availability, response times, mailbox access (user profiles, passwords) and mailbox by size (KB or number of messages).
     - SMTP email server - Check availability, response times, access (user profiles and passwords) and verify message send.
     - Check networked services - Check port and response times for Web servers (HTTP), FTP, Telnet, Client Access and third party applications.
     - Ping networked devices - Check availability and response times for printers, routers, disk subsystems, SAN storage, etc.

Alerting - any message or event received by VMC can be broadcasted to one or multiple mobile devices with the capability to reply (interactive or batch iSeries message) from the remote device and automate escalation rules.

VISUAL Message Center provides you with every tool imaginable to monitor and solve all your iSeries Interactive and Batch errors from any iSeries message queue, and support your users from anywhere in the world. VISUAL Message Center will put you back in control of your critical applications and processes simply and efficiently.  <

Other Message and Event Monitoring - Platform Support - Receive all your iSeries, NT/2000, Linux, Unix, or any Network device message (including B2B Apps, website, email, TCP/IP services, routers, etc.) from a single console and forward to proper responsible party via (pop-up Window, email, mobile SMS device, pager, etc) and in many cases automate corrective actions.

VISUAL Message Center will monitor your entire company's health of all your hardware, software and applications within your IT infrastructure, detecting any suspicious or potentially dangerous event and channels them into easy-to-understand graphical management console(s).  All of which is completely automated, using user-defined filters, priorities and policies, programmable actions, automatic recovery, and alert escalation capabilities to ensure your IT infrastructure always remains running.

VISUAL Message Center is unique in that it provides an enterprise wide solution that is accessible for small and medium sized companies, offering dedicated iSeries functionality at a fraction of the cost and complexity of enterprise management "frameworks".