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.'"

Comments

Please Clarify

[Anonymous Coward]

I dont understand. Is this an advertisement?

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 written by this guy, you'll notice that he is particularly fond of writing this type of "regurgitate the marketing" article.

Lowering firewall

[Anonymous Coward]

Captain, I am receiving unusual data from the alien probe.

Analysis Spock?

Insufficient data. It may be a successful penetration from the Romulan sector. Or...

Or?

Or accounting is performing their end of month reconciliation jobs.

I've seen this.

[MyLongNickName]

he 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.

The interesting thing is that no matter which 'signature' is noticed, the alert always reads "omfg n00b! read the fvcking manual!"

Wonder if there is a signature for

[fatboy]

http referrers from slashdot.org :)

Splunk with a different name?

[IGotYourSidekick]

How is this different from splunk? Now if it fixed problems for me...

Software is free, support is not

[DuckWizard]

I am really fascinated by this trend of selling support for open-source software. If a company creates a free, open-source product, and then uses support as their business model (RedHat, for example), doesn't that produce a conflict of interest in regards to the quality of their product? If the product is difficult to use, they will make more money off support. If it's rock-solid and completely intuitive, their revenues will crumble. Am I making any sense?

Re:Puzzled

[bcat24]

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

Huh?

[pongo000]

What kind of signatures? What kind of diagnostics? What the hell, exactly, is this article about?

And no, I'm not going to RTFA...if the submitter isn't articulate enough to succinctly describe what it is he or she is submitting, I'm not going to waste my time following the link.

Instead, I'm going to waste my time writing inane comments such as this...

Yea, right.

[BigCheese]

I can't count how many times I've heard this before. You either get spammed silly by alerts or turn the alerts down and then do what you did before you bought the product.

Sometimes you can get some use out of them but you've got to spend a whole lot of time with it in setup and ongoing adjustments.

Too many managers buy these things expecting a "Magic Bullet" solution.

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

The Phone Conversation

[Jerky McNaughty]

Here's the one-sided phone conversation, as heard from a neighbor of the support person at SourceLabs.

Hey, is Arnold around? This is Frank over at SourceLabs.
Hey, Arnold. It's me again. How's it going tonight?
Oh, really, it's 2:30am there? Wow.
Yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah, it's raining here in Seattle, of course.
Hey, listen, the reason I'm calling is because your shit, yeah, yeah, it's crashing again.
Hey, don't blame me. Talk to your manager about it.
Well, he's the one that bought this support.
Listen, though... the stack trace pops up on my screen here and I'm supposed to give you a call.
Well, yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, it's 24x7. You're somewhere in that 24 and somewhere in that 7, so here I am.
Yeah, I don't enjoy this either.
I know what you mean.
Well, the stack trace looks like your Oracle database is hosed again.
Yeah, tell me about it.
Well, you're using the thin-client drivers.
Looks like you can't get any JDBC connections. What a bitch.
I know, sucks that your site is down. What a pisser.
Well, most people monitor this kind of basic stuff on their own.
Yeah.
Uh huh.
Well, maybe some log4j and Nagios would work. Or something.
Yeah, really. It'd save the time it takes me to call you. Good thing you're only taking like 100 orders/minute at this time of day. Heh heh heh.
Yeah, I had to wake my ass up early this morning, too. I'd almost rather be doing drywall at the new McDonald's.
Yeah, ok, cool. Well, see if you can get your Oracle P.O.S. back up again.
Definitely.
Cool.
Well, I'll probably talk to you soon. Bye!