An Interview with Eric Frash

Eric Frash, Eli Lilly and Company's NT systems analyst, played a key role in implementing RoboMon NT to monitor the performance of the company's Windows NT enterprise. Here's his take on the project.

What did you like about the project's implementation?

Implementing RoboMon NT was very clean. The project freed us to concentrate on immediate problems. We have many NT servers to manage, and attempting to manually keep on top of how they are performing using NT's Perfmon was more work than we had time for.

What didn't you like about the project's implementation?

The only down side we encountered was the amount of memory the two service processes consume. A few times, an NT server was running low on available memory, and we decided to exit RoboMon NT to free space. On the flip side, RoboMon NT utilization of CPUs is low.

What would you have done differently on the project?

I would have liked to purchase more licenses and put the product on more servers. The rollout went fine for the time I had available, but I would have liked more time to learn how to customize some rules and write my own. Right out of the box, the product seems to cover many things I would have wanted to customize.

What advice can you give your peers?

Other IS managers who are considering using RoboMon NT will want to identify the servers that will benefit from this tool and invest in enough licenses. Although NT Server comes with some native data collection and performance analysis tools, they require a great deal of customization. RoboMon NT worked right out of the box and was stable.