There have been so many updates for AAG/NG4i since it was first released back in May 2023 and we are now adding a new release for the product with even more updates and new features.
When we first released AAG/NG4i we had somewhere around the 70’ish mark for the number of checks that we provided, now that number has risen to over 180. We have also added a lot more IBMi specific features that allow users to monitor and manage their IBM i using any one of the Nagios based products. We invested a lot of time looking at how we can provide better Nagios XI wizards that allow seamless integration with existing Nagios XI infrastructure monitors, ease of use was paramount as a number of our customers had little to no Nagios XI skills.
Having the IBM i monitors was only part of the solution, many of our customers use the Power HMC for configuration and management of their Power systems infrastructure and while the IBM provided HMC plugin was OK, it was not as good as it should be. Our first release of the HMC plugin worked but again just did not provide the performance we needed from it, so we looked at alternative methods for pulling the data back from the HMC (initially we used the Rest API’s) and now have a solution that is many times more efficient than the original process. This new release also adds a new HMC wizard that provides a similar experience to the IBM i wizard making the installation a breeze.
We are still shipping the free version of Nagios Core with our own management scripts and interfaces which are popular with the smaller IBM i customer that does not have the ability to invest in the Nagios XI or similar products, being able to run on a RPi or VM allows customers the flexibility to determine what additional infrastructure they want to implement.
Security is one of the biggest concerns of CIO’s according to the surveys carried out by the various IBM i pollsters, that is why we went the extra mile with AAG/NG4i by providing automated scripts that can be run on the IBM i to check for the latest PTF Groups and Security Bulletins and download the required fixes directly to an image catalog. No need to spend hours trying to figure out what LPP’s are installed and what PTFs are required to fill the gaps and exposures, the commands provided can pull all of that information together and download everything ready for you to install when you are ready. Using the AAG check commands will also provide notification when a new PTF group has been released or a new Security Bulletin has resulted in a PTF that is not installed on your system.
As we grow our installed base we became aware of a problem with the original release of AAG/NG4i, while we only support 2924/English for any language objects we found out that we needed to allow the installation on systems that did not have a 2924 language install available. So this release fixes that problem by allowing the product to be installed on systems that do not have language 2924 installed, eventually we may consider providing the language based objects in languages other than 2924.
AAG/NG4i will continue to grow and provide more new features as we find customers that need them, we feel AAG/NG4i is the premier solution on the market today for IBM i and Power HMC monitoring. We will constantly look to improve both the performance and the ease of use, new check commands that are application specific are already being looked at and ways of providing new insights into the IBM i environment using the data collected by NG4i will evolve as we move forward.
If you have not seen our products and would like to have a demo let us know using the links provided on the website, we think you will be amazed at just how easy it is to implement and setup AAG/NG4i and any one of our other products.
Chris…