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 Review
of Alchemy Eye
By Brien M. Posey
Contributing Writer
Article Date: 02.26.03
One of the biggest problems associated with running a large IT organization has
always been the issue of monitoring the server’s health. Rarely do organizations
have the staff available to dedicate someone to the task of watching servers.
In most of the organizations that I have worked for in the past, the support staff
continuously kept busy with the various day-to-day activities. We usually didn’t
know that a failure had occurred until the phones started ringing. Unless of course,
we were the ones that accidentally caused the failure.
At one point, a friend of mine came up with the idea of writing a script to ping
each server every half hour or so. If the ping failed, his script would generate
an e-mail message. While my friend seemed to be on the right track, it always
seemed that the failures occurred between pings or while everyone was out to lunch
or away from their e-mail.
This is where Alchemy Eye comes in. Alchemy Eye is a product that takes the concept
of testing the servers on a periodic basis and builds on it. Alchemy Eye builds
on this concept in a couple of different ways. First, Alchemy Eye gives you a
lot of different methods for testing a server’s availability. For example, you
could test a server by performing a standard TCP/IP ping, you could check the
availability of a Web site hosted on the server, you could test the server’s SMTP
or POP3 services, the server’s disk space, and much more.
The other way that Alchemy Eye builds on the basic principle of that script that
my friend created so long ago is that it provides lots of different actions that
can be taken when a failure is detected. The most obvious of these actions are
notifications. The notifications can come in the form of E-mails, pages, or pop
up messages, or sounds. Alchemy Eye doesn’t stop there though. The software can
also react to failures by restarting the machine, restarting services, performing
a database query, running a program, or running a VB script.
Testing Alchemy Eye
Now that you know a little bit about what Alchemy Eye is and what it does, let’s
move on to the testing. For this test, I installed Alchemy Eye 4.5.7. The entire
program consumed less than 2 MB of disk space, and the installation was very quick.
After launching the program, the first thing that I saw was a completely empty
console screen with a few icons at the top. However, the icons were fairly intuitive.
All I had to do to begin the configuration process was to click the green plus
sign. This allowed me to add a server to the currently empty list.
It’s relatively easy to configure a server for testing. I was able to do it without
using the instruction book. However, I didn’t really care for the design of the
template used to configure the server. For starters, each entry that you place
on the test list can perform a single test. That means that if you had a server
that was acting as an IIS Server and as a mail server and you wanted to test both
services, you would have to create multiple entries for the server. You also have
to create multiple entries for every volume that you wish to test the disk space
for. This means that if your server has ten volumes, you’ll have ten entries for
the disk tests. Since each entry in the test list has its own output line when
the tests are run, this can result in a lot of clutter in the output portion of
the screen.
On the flip side though, the product does do some things to compensate for its
poor interface. For example, the first time that a test fails, the failure is
displayed in red. Subsequent failures are displayed in the same color as all of
the other tests, but when the server becomes available again, a message will be
displayed in green. The product also logs all of the test results, and offers
a number of reports that you can use to help filter the mountains of data produced
by the tests.
Another thing that I didn’t really like about the product was that although tests
are designed to run repeatedly, the default value for any test that you create
prevents the test from running at all unless you run it manually. Changing this
value is no big deal, but it did catch me off guard the first time that I tried
to test a server. I would like to see the default testing interval changed to
20 seconds or so in future versions.
All in all, the interface was the only thing about the product that I didn’t like.
Once you get past the product’s interface, Alchemy Eye is very easy to use, and
works well. I particularly liked how flexible Alchemy Eye was. After all, being
able to configure Alchemy Eye to test your server’s mail services or look for
specific event log entries is much better than relying on a simple ping to test
the server. Of course you can always ping test the server if you want. Just don’t
look for the ping test in the TCP/IP section. The ping test has its own testing
category, listed as ICMP (ping).
My personal evaluation of Alchemy Eye is that it isn’t as powerful as some of
the other similar tools that I have tested, such as Opalis Robot. At the same
time though, Alchemy Eye tends to be easier to use than most of the higher end
products, and has a much more modest price tag than most of them. For example,
Opalis Robot costs ten times what Alchemy Eye does. While I probably wouldn’t
recommend Alchemy Eye as an enterprise level server monitoring solution, I think
that it would probably fit in well at all but the largest companies, especially
in situations in which a company can’t justify the cost of acquiring a more expensive
server monitoring product and training the administrative staff on how to use
it.
About the author:
| Brien Posey has written thousands of technical
articles on a variety topics. You can access many of them by signing up for a
free membership to Brien's personal Web site at www.brienposey.com.
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