New Continuous Support System

An anonymous reader writes "eWeek is reporting on a new continuous open-source support system that helps to keep tabs on your mission-critical applications by providing constant diagnostic monitoring. The system is designed to match specific 'signatures' from your applications to a database of over 200,000 possible 'problem' signatures and alert the user for correction or analysis. From the article: 'SourceLabs' Continuous Support System features what Sebastian calls "adaptive diagnostic probes" that are fully integrated and configured for customer environments. The probes identify production issues and begin to gather diagnostic information to help get to the root of the problem, he said. Indeed, the probes can be configured so that as soon as a problem occurs, the SourceLabs support team extracts system information to find and resolve the problem. And the system includes a database of more than 200,000 signatures of problems that might occur.'"

Please Clarify

[Anonymous Coward]

I dont understand. Is this an advertisement?

Real News or PR?!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Was that a news article or a fluff press release? It'd be nice if the editors could let us know in advance when a slashvertisement plug is posted to the front page.

Puzzled

[Colin Smith]

Is it just me or is the FA completely devoid of useful information about exactly what and how the "SourceLabs Continuous Support System, technology " works? A non article. I have no idea how it differs from say Zabbix or Nagios.

 

Re:Puzzled

[bcat24]

Indeed. You can find a little more information on their website [sourcelabs.com]. Because putting a link to the company in the article summary would just make things too easy for people, right?

Re:Please Clarify

[eln]

It's a fluff piece written by an "analyst" for a general-audience tech magazine, so basically it's a press release. If you look at other articles [findarticles.com] written by this guy, you'll notice that he is particularly fond of writing this type of "regurgitate the marketing" article.

Re:Huh?

[bcat24]

Don't worry, the article is almost as bad as the summary. You didn't miss much by not RTFAing.

Re:Puzzled

[Bruce Perens]

When your production Java program breaks, it tells you, and Sourcelabs. Various sorts of breakage are detected. Generally the interesting problems are in the Open Source stacks that Sourcelabs supports, not in your own code, although the system can sometimes tell you when you are tripping over a well-known sort of error or an API calling mistake in your own code. Depending on the problem, you get an automatic message and/or you hear from your support person at Sourcelabs. Sourcelabe may give you a patch, advice, etc.

One interesting point is that you don't call customer service. They call you.Bruce

Re:Puzzled

[SanityInAnarchy]

So tell me again how that's different than, say, Nagios?

Insanely configurable -- can catch all sorts of problems. Can run a definable shell script when something breaks -- I'm not talking about "automatic message" or emailing someone at Sourcelabs, we had the thing configured to send an email/SMS to the main admin's phone. Cuts out the middleman -- the program calls me, I fix the problem. Works well when your "customer support" is often in-house.

Re:Puzzled

[Bruce Perens]

Nagios detects failures elsewhere. This instruments the insides of your Java program and tells you about many different kinds of failures that can happen in there, and it generally also tells you how to solve the problem.