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I was playing around with the Data Integrator today, think about it as an adapter designed to bring in data from databases. I remember as a DBA that you sometimes had problems from time to time with table locks, page locks, dead locks, etc. I remember running stored procedures such as sp_who and other things. Anyways, I was curious if I could create an adapter that mined out the list of databases, then list the users currently logged into the corresponding database.

Answer: of course, that is easy. Issuing a select against syslogins (MS SQL) and joining to sysdatabases for additional details was easy enough. I set up the breakout on the adapter to use generators. Using generators is an easy way to automatically generate elements within a view from a single result set of data. I set up the query at the lowest level via an alarm query, set up a generator for the database (top level element) and then a child generator on the logged in user. I showed the details as an alarm also since it's nice to look at all the details on one screen sometimes.

From a state (condition to represent health of the element) standpoint, I had several options, I could assign severity rules based on the status of the connection, there is another table I could include that gets at blocks, endless ideas. If you were to join in the sysprocesses table, you have access to the current command being run, if there is a block going on, the host name they are connecting from, application name connecting, all kinds of helpful information.

The thought was, for an end to end view of a service where users make more of a direct access to the database for logins and queries, I could associate this information directly to the view. With that I could see the health of the application from a monitoring standpoint, but I could also see the currently logged in users to help identify impact when there was a performance problem going on... nice :)

Data Integrator is a tool that you can use to bring in data from databases. The data can be from a home grown application such as monitoring or helpdesk, but it can be other interesting artifacts that can provide the additional details to the operator to analyze the outage further to understanding impact. You could bring in finiancial data, budget vs actual, transaction volume, combine multiple silo'ed systems together, etc.

Anyways, just thought I'd share some ideas on what you could do with the Data Integrator.

Disclaimer: As with everything else at Cool Solutions, this content is definitely not supported by Novell (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up).

It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.