Admin-Scout 3.0 - Functional right from the start!

Admin-Scout 3.0 offers a completely revised design and up to 60% faster evaluations.

Revised user interface

The entire user interface of the Admin-Scout is designed more uniformly and with better performance. The access to configuration and server administration is clearly structured. Optimized table structures and scaling of the display, lead to a considerably faster page layout.

New SQL Toolbox

The version 3.0 impresses above all with the new SQL Toolbox with many powerful functions in the Database Explorer and SQL Editor. As a result the Admin-Scout offers more interesting functionalities for development and tuning of Informix databases.

Admin-Scout 2.3 - New Scheduler Module

We asked the question, which areas of an Informix database system have to be administered manually and where is it possible to set up an automated administration? The goal is to achieve increasing automation and independent optimization of the system through an interaction of sensors and tasks.

Informix provides an SQL API and corresponding commands as a basis for setting up tasks. If you are an Informix administrator and are rarely concerned with setting up and managing tasks and sensors, you will find that this can quickly become a complex challenge. Therefore, in the new version of our Admin-Scout, we have intensively addressed the topic of a task scheduler and developed a new Admin-Scout module for the administration of tasks and sensors.

The new Admin-Scout 2.3 Scheduler module offers a centralized administration of all tasks and sensors

Admin-Scout 2.3 - Overview new features in version 2.3

Already in the last versions many improvements were introduced for the security of the Admin Scout. It was very important for us that during a login no more passwords are transferred between Admin-Scout and the browser.

Version 2.3 continues our efforts to provide increased security against data spying between Informix Server and client or our Admin-Scout.

Overview of the new features:

• https port is now active - generating of a self-signed certificate.
• Setting up an encrypted SSL connection on the database port.
• Easier selection of instances - access to instances of different groups.
• Autologon-Feature – automatic connection to a standard instance.
• New Scheduler module - all Scheduler modules are now available in one place.
• New module Cluster Configuration.
• New module DBSpace Layout History.
• Backup/Restore now with SQL Editor Files.
• Additional reporting on the InformixHQ Monitoring Database.

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

Do you have any suggestions or improvement requests regarding the Admin-Scout?

Simply write us a few lines in our development request form - we look forward to your suggestions

Your Admin-Scout development team.