Monitoring stories

Office, Home Office, what about Beach Office? It doesn't matter how remote your workers are, they need to be able to connect securely to the Main Office so they can access all their files and data as if they were in the Office. And VPNs are the main way this gets down.

As an IT administrator, how can you ensure that the VPN server is always up so people can get their work done? Use Alyvix and Alyvix Service to continually check the state of your VPN from outside your company, where your remote workers are. Read on to see how.

Visual monitoring is an exciting complement to traditional monitoring that allows for full, end-to-end monitoring. Beyond monitoring just your hardware, it checks that your apps and services are always as responsive as your users and customers expect them to be. Alyvix Service and Alyvix work together to monitor your apps, delivering reports and historical data that you can use to both diagnose specific problems with your apps, and to help foresee IT problems before they affect your users. Let's see how.

Today we take a look at the entire Alyvix Service lifecycle when it's used together with a monitoring system. We build a complete test case from scratch that uses Remote Desktop (RDC) to log in to a remote server, run an application there, and receive and review reports that include timing data and screenshots of each measured task step.

These days who has time to check out new software? You could easily spend half a day figuring things out reading the website. Well, we've got you covered with our 2 minute video that explains it simply: what Alyvix is and what Alyvix does. In fact it takes less time to watch than it does to read this article!

Just like private enterprises, government agencies operate web services running vital services that need to be monitored for availability and responsiveness. Today we'll talk with Gabriele Cecco, who created a visual monitoring test case for a regional government. We'll get his insights into both some important features, as well as how to diagnose what's going on when you're building a test case and it doesn't work the way you expected.

If you've worked with Alyvix for a few years, perhaps you've noticed every so often that your test cases stop working for no apparent reason. If the underlying problem isn't an actual system fault (congratulations, your monitoring is working as intended!) then the cause is almost always a change in the interface that you're monitoring.

While some large "breaking" changes will obviously require you to create a new Alyvix test case, more often it's just a minor change, for instance Alyvix can't find a button that's been moved due to a software update, or a multi-user system has persistent window properties. In this best practices blog, I'll show you how you can build more robust test cases so that these minor interface changes won't interrupt your monitoring and keep you from rebuilding your test cases.