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Here's my two cents on the monitoring issue:

I think cc:Mail View has some strengths and some weaknesses. There are things that it does well, things that it does acceptably but should do better and things that it doesn't really do at all but probably should.

Other than the performance impact, I think the main reason customers are often critical of the product is that the things it does well do not match the most immediate, real-world concerns of cc:Mail administrators (or consultants!).

Here are my views of View's strengths and weaknesses...

Things that View does well:

As I see it, the strength of View is really the data collection and reporting, not monitoring per se. View is not real-time and doesn't directly monitor anything. View reports, however, can be extremely useful in assessing resource consumption and monitoring (after the fact) message traffic. The potential exists to monitor various trends as well. From an IS management perspective these data are definitely valuable.

Things that View does acceptably but should do better:

What View does acceptably is queue monitoring. However, queue monitoring, especially as currently implemented, is both limited in functionality and inadequate as the primary monitoring mechanism. The value here lies in the fact that it can send notification messages based on user-defined thresholds, and of course integrate with cc:Pager, both of which are highly valuable.

However, View cannot directly monitor particular Routers or gateways (an immediate real-world concern), therefore, View needs increased granularity. In other words, View needs to show data for each Router, gateway, etc., and it needs to be closer to real-time. Perhaps more important, View needs to reach beyond simple queue back ups as the only error detection mechanism. This method is too indirect and may not work at all unless a problem persists over an indefinite period time.

Things that View doesn't really do at all but probably should:

Another central weakness is that objects displayed in the View maps are largely empty of content. Only post offices have content, not queues, batch files, Mobile users, Routers, etc.. In other words, Wide Area Mail Management (WAMM) is simply not a reality. Most of the objects in the View maps are present in name only. One cannot tell, for example, when a Mobile user last checked in, what messages are in the queue that View can directly access, their sizes, times and dates; when a call to a given PO was last made or when batch file last ran.

What is important about these strengths and weaknesses, however, is that View represents an evolutionary step in the right direction. The strong data collection and reporting functionality will remain in future versions.

Having said this, I should point out that there is no other product that can do everything View does, although ABS Gateway Monitor and Baranoff Mail Check are strong offerings that can certainly be seen as complimentary and used as building blocks in a home-spun monitoring system.

Ron