Foxhound 1.2 Is Now Available

Foxhound is a browser-based health, availability and performance monitor for SQL Anywhere that displays everything you need to know at a glance.

... and it's FREE! (to upgrade, that is)

If you already have version 1.0 or 1.1, Foxhound 1.2 is now available as a free upgrade.

If not, you can get an evaluation copy or buy a copy here.

• Here's the download,
  

• here's the FAQ,
  

• here are the Docs,
  

• here are the basic Features, and
  

Here's the What's New . . .

Now it's easier to manage up to 100 Monitor sessions:

• The "Alerts Criteria" page has been redesigned as the "Monitor Options" page.
  

  See: The Monitor Options Page.

• The Default Settings can now be edited apart from the options for any particular target database.
  

  See: Monitor Options - Switch Display.

• The new Force Default Settings On All Targets button on the Monitor Options page lets you "push" the default settings to all the targets, all at once. Previously, you could only "pull" the settings to each target one at a time with the Restore Default Settings button.
  

  See: Save And Restore Alerts Criteria Defaults.

• The Manage Multiple Monitor Sessions feature lets you specify batches of target databases, and the Start and Stop All Sessions buttons let you turn sampling on and off for each batch.

  See: Manage Multiple Monitor Sessions.

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The Monitor tab on the Foxhound Menu page is now easier to use, and more informative:

• The lists of targets and outstanding Alerts have been vertically squished so you don't have to scroll down so far when you've got lot of targets.
  

• The Disable Refresh and Enable Refresh buttons make it easier to scroll down to look at something.
  

• More "at a glance" columns have been added:
  
  • Active Alerts count, with a link down into the Alerts list
    
  • Conns
    
  • Waiting Req
    
  • Locks Held, Blocked Conns
    
  • CPU Time
    
  • Temp Space
    
  • Disk Reads, Writes
    

• The Start All Sampling and Stop All Sampling buttons let you turn sampling on and off for all the targets.
  

See: The Monitor Tab.

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Scrolling through gigabytes of data on the History page used to be slowwwww, like continental drift, now it's faster.

Plus, new scroll amounts have been added (500 samples and 3 hours):

« Newest « 500 « 100 « 20 « 1 sample         1 sample » 20 » 100 » 500 » Oldest » 
« Month « Week « Day « 3 Hours « 1 Hour   1 Hour » 3 Hours » Day » Week » Month »

...and, the "Freeze Frame Heights" button lets you resize and freeze the History page frames so they don't reset ("Grrr!") every time you scroll:

• The database-level samples frame,
  

• the blocked connections frame and
  

• the current connections frame.
  

See: The History Page.

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It's your data; now it's easier to run adhoc queries:

• New views have been added for adhoc reporting.
  

• A separate read-only "Adhoc Schema" database lets you see what the views and underlying tables look like.
  

• New connection-level columns have been added to make queries easier to write:

  LockRowID                         BIGINT NULL
  blocked_connection_count          BIGINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0
  current_req_status                VARCHAR ( 100 ) NOT NULL DEFAULT ''             
  cache_satisfaction                DECIMAL ( 30, 0 ) NOT NULL DEFAULT 0.0 
  time_connected                    BIGINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0
  total_waits                       BIGINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0 
  waiting_time                      DECIMAL ( 30, 6 ) NOT NULL DEFAULT 0.0
  transaction_running_time          BIGINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0
  time_since_last_request           BIGINT NOT NULL DEFAULT 0
  index_satisfaction                DECIMAL ( 30, 0 ) NOT NULL DEFAULT 0.0

  Except for LockRowID, all the new columns contain values that Foxhound used to calculate only when the data was displayed on the Monitor and History pages; now these values are calculated once and stored permanently.
  

See: How do I run adhoc queries on the Foxhound database?

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Now you can use Gmail to send Alert emails as well as receive them.

See: How do I tell Foxhound to send Alert emails via the Gmail SMTP server smtp.gmail.com?

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The data upgrade process now runs faster...

...as well as giving you control over how much data to upgrade:

• The default is FOXHOUND1UPGRADE = ALL to copy all the data from your old Foxhound database to the new one.
  

• If you choose FOXHOUND1UPGRADE = OPTIONS during the installation process, Foxhound will copy everything except the Monitor samples. When you start Foxhound again, all the old sample data will be gone but sampling will start again right away (assuming it was running before you installed the new version).
  

• If you want to save the Monitor samples recorded since a particular date, specify FOXHOUND1UPGRADE = yyyymmmdd.
  

• To save the samples recorded during the past n days, use FOXHOUND1UPGRADE = n.
  

What's really cool about the new upgrade process is you can use it to purge, shrink and reorganize the Foxhound database: just reinstall the same version of Foxhound with FOXHOUND1UPGRADE = yyyymmmdd or FOXHOUND1UPGRADE = n.

See:

How do the different FOXHOUND1UPGRADE values work?

How do I shrink the size of the Foxhound database?

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Good news, bad news:

• Foxhound still supports all versions of SQL Anywhere from 5.5 through 12.0.1.
  

• Foxhound itself now runs on SQL Anywhere Version 12.0.1.
  

• Foxhound will use the 64-bit version of SQL Anywhere 12.0.1 if it is installed. Previously, Foxhound ran only on the 32-bit version of SQL Anywhere 11.0.1.
  

  See: How do I tell if Foxhound is running on the 32-bit or 64-bit version of SQL Anywhere?

• You can force Foxhound to use the 32-bit version of SQL Anywhere by setting the FOXHOUND1BIN environment variable to Bin32... sometimes, it's just easier to do that than to try to figure out what's going wrong with ODBC and a legacy target database.
  

  See: How do I start Foxhound with the 32-bit version of SQL Anywhere when both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of SQL Anywhere are installed?

• Bad news: Foxhound requires SQL Anywhere 12.0.1.3298 or later to run. And it still only runs on Windows. But none of that affects your target database: as long as Foxhound can establish an ODBC connection to your database, it can monitor the performance and display the schema.
  

  See: Requirements.

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The look-and-feel of the Foxhound Options page has changed to match the new improved Monitor Options window.

See: The Foxhound Options Page.

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A single global "Enable Emails" setting has been added to the Foxhound Options page in case you want to turn off an accidental "alert storm".

See: Foxhound Options - Global Overrides.

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New shortcuts have been added:

start - All Programs 
   Foxhound1
      Start Foxhound via Chrome
      Tools 
         Backup Foxhound Transaction Log
         Start Foxhound via Chrome - debug

See:

How do I start Foxhound?

How do I backup my Foxhound database?

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Exception handling has been improved to allow Foxhound to continue operating after receiving bad data from a target database.

See: How do I report unexpected errors and exceptions?

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The thirty-day Evaluation period can now be extended: just get a Evaluation Renewal key from breck.carter@gmail.com.

See: How do I get a copy of Foxhound?

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