Secret Tools of the Common Crow…

In case you wondered where this article went a couple of weeks ago, it had to be pulled and revised at the request of RES, as we incorrectly stated that you could get the tools at RES support. This is not currently the case.  Anyway, this posting was really supposed to have be called Secret tools of the RES Engineer, but then all of a sudden, an old Gary Larson cartoon came to mind, and ruined everything… Damn you Mr. Larson!! ;-)

Okay… so maybe a spatula isn’t gonna make the 10 o’clock news, but perhaps some other tools which are little known, which are really nice to know about would peak your interest. There is just one catch to this. You’ll have to ask around for the utilities in this article as they were really only written for internal use, but several customers and integrators got copies of them. Please do NOT contact RES Support for these tools.

Nevertheless, you ought to know about them as they can help you speed up a troubleshooting session by having the information available. Perhaps RES will make these things downloadable in the future. If this happens, stick around, RESguru will let you know.

Click here to read the article.

Zen and the Art of PowerTrace

A  nice presentation shared by one of the friendly folks over at RES. This one is called Business Value of PowerTrace. It essentially shows you all the cool things which you can find out about your organization, using PowerTrace, a component of PowerFuse 2008 Enterprise edition. Please be sure to check the speaker notes on the PowerPoint, as there is a ton of valuable information in there. Some of the things you can discover are:

• What’s a certain user been doing at a certain time?
• Who’s been doing things they’re not supposed to do?
• Who’s been editing a certain [type of] docment in a given department?
• Web activity of a user or department
• What’s the Top-10 usage of applications and websites?
• What’s the daily maximum users on my terminal servers?

These and other questions are answered in the presentation. Enjoy: