Sad to say this but after a full day of testing the latest Shockey Monkey agent code I am not ready to let it loose yet. I’m buying myself another week and will hope to push out the agents in a beta next Monday (instead of tonight, as planned). The problems are as follows:
- Shockey Monkey mobile agent designed for Windows Mobile 6 and Windows Mobile 5 utilizes the SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition to provide offline content and caching. So if you update a ticket or create a contact when you have 0 reception, or want to quickly look up a contact, etc – the call is made to the local SQL database on the device. It seems that the rollout of that will require an update of mobile .NET framework and some other kung fu, not to mention prettying up the Interface.
- The Server Monitoring WMI agent needs some server-side work to integrate properly into the ticket SLA escalation process. The way it currently works, you are required to deploy an executable on the remote server (that you wish to monitor) on which a Windows Service is installed. That service constantly feeds the server various inventory data (peripherals, system events) as well as pingbacks to track uptime, etc. Since its WMI based obviously lots of things can be monitored but designing a friendly interface around that is proving more difficult than I thought (friendly not powerful).
- Random improvements to the SLA manager, network and system documentation sections, new ACL controls and how it all ties in together is something I have to discuss with Chad at greater length. I know how others are doing it and I think it blows, there has to be a better way.
I’ve literally be doing dev work for about a week now, plus a few other business roadblocks, so I have not had a chance to activate anyone. I will likely do some towards the end of the week.
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