Review: DMS Clarity Suite 2005

DMS Clarity Suite 2005, contact Sales for pricing
Devil Mountain Software, Inc.
Wellington, Florida
 (561) 829-8097
http://www.devilmount.com/

You can shift more and more of your software needs to subscription-based services on the Internet these days. Here's the latest one that I've run across: performance monitoring and evaluation for servers running Microsoft Windows. With DMS Clarity Suite, most of your management infrastructure is outsourced to Devil Mountain's servers. All you do is sign up for an account (you can get a 48-hour test drive for free), and then download, install, and configure a small monitoring agent. This only took a couple of minutes, and didn't even require a reboot - certainly a big plus for a running server. After that, the agent periodically sends performance information up to the servers, where it's archived, analyzed, and made available for your inspection through a secure Web portal.

The portal emphasizes quick information and recommendations. For example, the Lifecycle Analysis view gives you a graph telling you how many of your systems you should expect to have to upgrade in the next six months, one year, and so on, together with simple color-coded (red/yellow/green) metrics on CPU, RAM, and I/O load. You can drill down to a lot of more detailed info if you need it - charts of how things changed over time, and even process-level numbers - but the default graphs and charts are at an executive dashboard level. DMS says they base their basic index calculations on extensive research profiling machines in use in the financial services sector.

Another nice aspect of DMS Clarity is that, even though the data is hosted, it isn't locked up solely on the server. You can export selected subsets of the detailed data (in zipped Jet MDB format), and there's a handy page on the portal that lets you build deep links into your data repository. These links return their data as raw HTML tables, so you can use them from applications such as Excel that can consume HTML directly for further analysis. Other features include the ability to set up alerts that notify you via a log entry when a particular monitoring threshold is crossed and access to Clarity Studio, a workload simulation tool.

Using a hosted solution has its pros and cons, of course. On the plus side, the software installation is absolutely minimal; the agent is small and painless to put on as many machines as you like, and the results are available anywhere you have a Web browser, with zero maintenance hit to your IT department. DMS Clarity Suite does a good job of providing informative summaries of your data as well. On the minus side, of course, you are shipping machine performance data off to a remote server, which means using up some bandwidth (not an excessive amount, but something to keep in mind if there are slow links in your network) and some organizations may worry about the privacy implications. Overall, I found this to be a workable and simple alternative to setting up one of the many in-house monitoring solutions.

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Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics.

Published September 19, 2005