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Heroix RoboMon Is No Gamble for the
Ontario Lottery
 What was once a
small operation with one game in 1975 is now the largest
lottery organization in Canada. Operating six provincial
games and two interprovincial games, the Ontario Lottery
Corporation (OLC) relies heavily upon its three data
centers to support its daily operations. In order to
monitor these data centers, the OLC brought in RoboMon.
But, the OLC gained much more from RoboMon's
capabilities than expected.
The OLC's data centers are composed of one main
operations center, a smaller version of the main center
in case of disaster recovery, and a third center
primarily consisting of system development machines and
general purpose clusters. These centers support over 40
Digital VAX computers ranging from VAXstations to 7,000
class machines. Along with the data centers, the OLC has
six regional sales offices that are networked through PC
servers.
RoboMon is currently being used to monitor
performance and automate operations for the OLC's VAX
CPUs, networks, disks, and memory resources. "We
weren't looking for automation at first, it became a big
bonus," states Dave Karl, Operations System
Analyst. Dave explained that they were looking for tools
to do graphs and reporting, as well as performance
tuning and advising, and capacity planning. "When
evaluating the advising and tuning capabilities,"
Dave says, "RoboMon was the only product that made
specific tuning recommendations to SYSGEN parameters and
was able to implement those recommendations in real
time."
RoboMon was evaluated by the OLC's Systems Support
and Computer Operations departments. The operations
staff is responsible for disk backups and general
housekeeping of machines, while the systems support
staff covers equipment setup, software installation, and
the monitoring of networks, CPUs, disks, and memory
resources. As part of the systems support area, Dave
describes the RoboMon installation process as quite
simple. "I found RoboMon very easy to use. We had a
lot of help from Heroix's support department since our
requirements were specific. In fact, we've been very
pleased with the knowledge level of Heroix's technical
staff it's a rare occasion that an answer to a question
is unknown."
According to Dave, they were most impressed with the
flexibility of the product. "We're able to create
site-specific rules that are critical to certain
operations." In once instance there were problems
with runaway application processes. Apparently, PC users
would try exiting an application by pressing a
particular function key. When this key didn't work (due
to possible keyboard mapping problems), the users would
begin randomly hitting other keys until the screen
cleared. The users, thinking the process was finished,
would simply continue their work. "But," Dave
explains, "in reality on the VAX system, 100
percent of CPU resources were still being used. We
therefore wrote and implemented a specific rule where,
if RoboMon finds a runaway process, it suspends it. In
other words, RoboMon detects the problem, takes the
action, and then notifies our operations staff."
RoboMon has helped the OLC identify repeat offenses and
consequently has enabled them to figure out which
departments need training. "The fact that RoboMon
could solve this single recurring problem was worth the
entire price of the product."
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