News

This year we organized again an encounter for Wotan users, developers and partners to discuss about experiences, new developements and future needs. On June 09, 2015 we all met together at the event centre of our newest customer voestalpine and discussed our current Wotan 6 Version. Furthermore we discussed how to make Wotan more user friendly and we presented special features of our brandnew Wotan Version 7, which will be released in a few month. 

Why external Monitoring?

Our longtime partner Ing. Markus Reitshammer of Re-Systems presented our current shared project "External IT Monitoring". To guarantee a quick customer-, supplier- and stakeholder service, most companies, regardless of size and sector, depend on reliable IT services. Therefore it is even more important to monitor the functionality of those IT services from an external view. The GHI togehter with our partner Re-Systems know about the importance of this topic and therefore we are working on a hosting solution in combination with Wotan. In the near future we will offer an external Monitoring solution of the most important services (websites, Emails, webshops...). 

Wotan 6, a review

At the beginning of Philipp Ghirardini's presentation, software developer at GHI, he gives detailed insight in the features of the current Version 6 of Wotan Monitoring software. The new Alerting module including the Contact Catalog, Holiday-Calendars and the Calendar view was not new for our guests. But with the Wotan Roles, Host and Template variables even some longtime users discovered something new.

Wotan 7, Dashboards and Widgets

Right now GHI developes Wotan Dashboards, which focus on the user and the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Mr. Ghirardini showed how to adapt the Dashboards to his own requirements. He further showed how to display relevant information with the new development, Widgets. Beside the presentation about our existing product features, the GHI focused on our guests imputs, critics, wishes and needs. The following list shows decided future projects, based on our guests needs:

• Assign Wotan Roles to individual Dashboards. Users with this role have access to these Dashboards and are able to adapt them. Additional Dashboards can be assigned to a role and adapted Dashboards can be reset.
• New Widgets to integrate the existing NagVis maps and business processes.
• A new Widget to focus on important Hosts (depending on the user) will be developed. The Widget includes the most important performance data (e.g.: CPU, RAM HDD) which are displayed graphically. Furthermore current problems are highlighted. Also the performance data history can be displayed with the new Widget.
• Based on the documented resource consumption, estimations about the future development of the resource should be possible. This feature should facilitate the planning capability of limited resources. If a threshold is exceeded or an extraordinary increase occurs an alert is triggered. Furthermore the estimations (trends) of the future resource consumption are saved additionally as reports. Those reports are generated regularly.
• For some of our users, scheduled Downtimes or acknowledged problems are of great importance even after their appearance. To document this information a special report will be offered, which will be generated regularly.

Conclusion

This year's Wotan user meeting was not only interesting because of the special venue, the voest Stahlwelt in Linz and the following guided tour, but also because of all the discussed topics for future developments and the requirements of our guests. The GHI and its team got a lot of feedback to Wotan Version 6 and 7, which we will consider for the future development of Wotan. Right now we already work on many of the user's suggestions to improve Wotan and its features and some of them should even be realeased with the new Wotan Version 7. The event with all its valuable discussions was a great success and we hope to see you all again at the next Wotan user meeting.