Welcome to sybmon II @ Sourceforge.

Sybmon is Java based realtime process, lock and block monitoring tool for Sybase ASE servers. It performs a little like top, continuously displaying an ASE process list to a screen, giving DBAs, users or help desks a snapshot view of what is happening on a server. As well as processes, it displays the current list of locks and blocks, if any.

The app has a couple of nice features that are useful to DBAs. Firstly, the list of blocks is hierarchical. This means that the list of blocks indicates which processes are those that are actually holding things up. So if process A is blocked and process B is simply waiting for process A, process B appears to be blocked. If a lot of processes are blocked, this can be irritating. You only need to know those at the base of the blocking tree. The others are noise. sybmon puts a '*' next to the ones that need to be sorted (AKA killed) first in order to get the application back on the rails.

The second neat feature, is that whilst watching a block list or process list, a pattern is spotted. At that point it would be nice to see the locks that other processes are holding at the same time. sybmon spawns a thread for each of the processes, lock and block listers, so when you press the pause button you can still switch panels and see the other information at the same time.

I don't think either of these useful features exist in any other tool on the market. That, and the fact that it is multiplatform, make sybmon a tool that no DBA can be without.

Why sybmon II or 2.0? Originally, sybmon was a Perl/Tk script. It did much the same as this version with the exception of running the monitoring parts as background threads. This meant that you could not switch from panel to panel and still see the other information. Actually, it didn't have panels, but used radio buttons to switch. So, an upgrade was looked into and since Perl threading was not quite production ready and also that the panels in Perl/Tk did not exist natively, and the ones that did looked a little klunky, it was decided to move it to Java.

The sourceforge project page for sybmon can be found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/sybmon