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ALMToolbox Newsletter February 2016

ALMToolbox CEO Tamir GefenThe past year was a great year for us, and we keep investing in developing new add-on tools and extending the ALM tools we support! See our new tools and our upcoming tools below.

We also extended our team of experts who provide professional services. We’d be glad to help you with any challenges you face with ALM and DevOps and share our knowledge and unique expertise in ClearCase, ClearQuest, Jenkins, JIRA, RTC, DOORS and other ALM tools.

      
   

What’s in this newsletter?

IBM InterConnect 2016 is around the corner; What’s new in our add-on tools and what’s new in IBM toolset.

IBM InterConnect 2016

IBM InterConnect 2016 ClearCase ClearQuest

Are you attending InterConnect this month?

Want to schedule a 1:1 meetireng and share your challenges regarding ClearCase, ClearQuest, Jenkins? We can help, and there’s a good chance that we’ve already resolved your particular challenge!
If you’d like to meet please send an email to info@almtoolbox.com and we’ll coordinate a meeting with you.

We wrote a post in our blog about the upcoming ClearCase ClearQuest sessions during the conference: read here.

New: Monitoring tool for ClearCase, ClearQuest and Jenkins

Monitoring tool ClearCase ClearQuest Jenkins

We made a new monitoring tool that continuously tracks the vitality of your critical tools in the ALM supply chain. It monitors both IT and application components, and alerts you (in real-time) if something goes wrong.
Version 1.2 is out, and it monitors the following:

ClearCase VOB servers and clients:

  1. Check if the host is alive and can be reached over the network.
  2. Test to make sure that the ClearCase main service (ALBD) is up and running.
  3. Test to make sure that all the needed ClearCase ports are listening and can interact with RPC calls.
  4. Test the ClearCase check-out command execution (on your selected VOBs), making sure your application is running as it should (and of course it applies undo checkout right after)
  5. Monitor the status of the server’s available storage capacity, and let you define thresholds and get notifications before you run out of space.
  6. Monitor your license server availability and verify the number of available licenses. ALM Vitality lets you define thresholds and get notifications before you run out of licenses.

ClearQuest:

  1. Check if the host is alive and can be reached by basic network protocol.
  2. Check if the web server running ClearQuest is responding correctly.
  3. Check if the web application running on the web-server is responding correctly.
  4. Check if the HTTP server is responding correctly.
  5. Check whether the ClearQuest database is responding.
  6. Check if the ClearQuest application is running correctly and responding as it should.
  7. Monitor the status of the server’s available storage capacity, and let you define thresholds and get notifications before you run out of space.
  8. Monitor your license server availability and verify the number of available licenses. ALM Vitality lets you define thresholds and get notifications before you run out of licenses.

Jenkins Master and Slaves:

  1. Check if the host is alive and can be reached by basic network protocol.
  2. Test to make sure that Jenkins service \ process is up and running
  3. Test to make sure that all the needed ports for the web application are listening.
  4. Check to see whether the Jenkins web application running is responding correctly.
  5. Check if your JVM is running.
  6. Monitor the status of the server’s available storage capacity, and let you define thresholds and get notifications before you run out of space.
  7. Report jobs that are running more time than they should (i.e. monitor stuck jobs). You configure which jobs to monitor, and you can determine a relevant threshold for each monitored job separately.

Last week we shared some insights we got from our first users of this tool – read here.

Want to evaluate it? Please email vitality@almtoolbox.com

We also produced a 20 min. webinar that demonstrates this tool and explains the rationale behind this tool. Click to watch.

New: Visual Studio Extension for ClearCase \ ClearQuest v1.5 is out!

This extension enables you to discover critical information for each code line:

  • When it was checked-in and by whom
  • Which version and branch or UCM stream it was checked into
  • Relevant labels or UCM baselines
  • Comments that were also placed when the file version was being checked-in

The extension is seamlessly integrated with ClearCase and Visual Studio.
Watch a live demo:

Click to download (It works with Visual Studio 2010, 2012, 2013 or 2015)

New: “Get real Change” utility for developers and release engineers

Get Real Change is a new command-line utility we made to help developers and release engineers who have to quickly find out where the code was really changed.

Get Real Change utility for ClearCase

Do you sometimes have to find out where a certain code line was really changed (and by whom) and feel like you’re looking for a needle in a haystack?
Does that cause you to avoid using the ClearCase Version Tree or ClearCase History tools as a result?

If so, try our new solution that quickly finds out where the code was REALLY changed; by whom; what defect \activity it’s related to, as well as other change–related info.
We implemented a smart and very efficient algorithm inside so it runs really fast.
Click to download and to learn more.

This tool is part of our full client Visual Annotate and our Visual Studio Extension and it also embedded inside (so you can use it from the context menu when you hover on your code lines).

It can also provide details from ClearQuest or RTC if you integrate them with ClearCase.

Did you know? Visual Annotate can help you integrate ClearCase with any bug trackers

Our Visual Annotate for ClearCase can be integrated with any bug trackers, including ClearQuest, JIRA, RTC and many others.

This gives you full traceabilty so you can see the correlation from code line to relevant defect or enhancement in your bug tracker! Click to learn more

New Releases are coming soon – stay tuned

We will soon be releasing new and improved versions of our add-on tools:

  • VOBs and VOB servers’ health checks (ClearCheck)
  • Reporting, charts and analytics for Clearcase and ClearQuest \ RTC (R&D Reporter)
  • Visual Annotate for Linux
  • Performance monitoring for ClearCase (watch a live demo)

If you want to get a beta version for any of the above tools, please send an email to beta@almtoolbox.com

What’s new in the latest ClearCase Releases?

  • Improvements to automatic views (a new kind of view that works like dynamic views in wide area networks and clouds)
  • New enhancements to the Change Management Interface (CMI) which provides a modern integration between ClearCase and ClearQuest, JIRA and Rational Team Concert (RTC)
  • ClearTeam Explorer (CTE) enhancements
  • Supporting Windows 10 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6
  • Supporting SSL V3

Click to learn more.

Do you need some help with ClearCase or ClearQuest?

We’d love to help! Contact our expert team at services@almtoolbox.com

Do you have to renew licenses or purchase some new licenses? Contact sales@almtoolbox.com

What’s new in Jazz Tools

RTC, DOORS and CLM 6.0.1 are out and there are many new enhancements! Click to learn more