MAGNAQuery Query and Data Analysis Tool

MAGNAQuery: A Powerful Multi-tool for Data Analysis

This application’s appearance is modest, but it can boast of unparalleled power in SQL query data analysis and more. This is the only application currently on the market that allows business analysts, data analysts, software developers, and everyone who works with data to quickly perform analysis that otherwise would have required them to write much more complex queries. In a few keystrokes, clicks, or taps, they can:

Register connections with any number of databases that run on a broad range of server engines.
Simultaneously execute any number of SQL queries and view their results in tabs, in grid or plain text format, on screen or in files.
Compare result grids between tabs and connection windows.
See the number and data types of columns, navigate to them, or select them.
Navigate to specific rows.
Search result grids for values of many data types that include text, numbers, dates and their parts, or binary values^*.
Generate a broad range of scripts and formats, from rows, columns, or disparate cells of the result grids.
Search connected database metadata or data.
Compare connected database schemas.

The following database engines are supported in the initial release, making MAGNAQuery an ideal tool for heterogeneous environments and data migration projects:

Microsoft SQL Server
Oracle
MySQL
PostgreSQL
IBM DB2
SAP/Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise
SAP/Sybase Adaptive Server Anywhere

The following engine support is currently in beta stage and available by special request:

Interbase/Firebird
Informix

Formats currently supported for the scripting of the results:

SQL tables/variables/views, etc.
XML
HTML tables/selects
JSON

It is worth re-iterating that query results and database schemas from any of these engines can be compared, in a couple of clicks or taps.

As is always the case with Zenith Elevate’s products, and unlike with some of its competitors, credentials of registered connections are secured by the strong encryption of Windows data protection API.

Also, MAGNAQuery is fully customizable, and its configuration can be shared with co-workers, by way of taking a backup of its database and restoring it on another device. Users are welcome to tailor metadata search queries to their specific requirements. Its default database back-end is MS SQL Express, but it can optionally run on a full MS SQL Server. It is quick to load and perform its functions, even on older systems^**.

* Support varies from engine to engine.

** Performance of queries and searches depends on the target database server instance.

New Product Announcement: MAGNABase

MAGNABase Database Analysis and Tuning Tool

Having been originally conceived as “DBA-in-a-can” tool, this product quickly grew into an “IT-consulting-team-in-a-can” system. In a matter of seconds, it performs a wide array of functions that are time-consuming and are normally handled by expert DBAs, operations, and software developers. It can potentially save between hours and months of work, for small to medium IT teams that cannot afford full-time database experts on payroll. Here’s how it works.

Through its plugins, MAGNABase supports a growing number of database back-ends. Currently they are:

MS SQL Server
MySQL
Oracle
PostgreSQL

On each, it can perform a set of analytical operations. Support varies from engine to engine. Almost all of the analyses produce a script that can then be reviewed, adjusted, and applied in a controlled manner. No direct changes are immediately made to the database, and superuser access is not required by MAGNABase. Refer to the plugin feature matrix for the features supported by DB back-end plugins.

	MS SQL	MySQL	Oracle	PostgreSQL
Slow-running queries	Yes
Storage overstatement	Yes		Yes	Yes
Compression	Yes
Insecure table access	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Table audit	Yes
Missing indices	Yes
Unused indices	Yes		Yes
Models	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

Slow-running queries

This analysis uses several objects that MAGNABase creates in its own database on your server. At the center of it lies a variation of the famous Who Is Active stored procedure that runs on a specified schedule, in SQL Agent. The schedule interval alone defines how long is considered ‘long’. During its every iteration, the job collects information about the queries that are still running since the previous one. This information can then be visualized by MAGNABase in a user-friendly format. It is retained for a user-configurable number of days.

Compression

This analysis calculates statistics on the data in table columns and determines whether they can benefit from compression. It then generates a script that compresses columns that would compress considerably.

Storage overstatement

This analysis looks at column data types across your database and analyzes data stored in them. By comparing these two values, it determines by how much column data width or data type can be adjusted, in order to reduce table and index storage requirements while still preserving the integrity of the data. This analysis can be configured to pad character data by a desired value.

Insecure table access

This analysis uses the pattern of access to tables via stored procedures. It generates a script that creates CRUD stored procedures and revokes select/insert/update/delete permissions from users. By applying this script, the DBA can then expose the database to the outside world only through the stored-procedure-based API, preventing any user from directly accessing the data.

Table audit

This analysis creates audits for the tables in your database.

Missing indices

MAGNABase reviews history of query plans and determines which tables and columns can benefit from the creation of indices, then generates a script that creates them. This can dramatically improve performance of some of slower queries.

Unused indices

Opposite the Missing Indices analysis, MAGNABase determines which indices are not used by any queries and generates a script that drops them. This is beneficial to the reduction of extra storage space and improves performance.

Models

Common among all of the supported storage engines is the generation of high-level programming language models from tables. Currently, the following languages are supported:

C#
Java
PHP

For each language, MAGNABase can be configured to expose columns as public fields, getters, getters and setters, or getters and setters with property change notification. Minimal manual editing may be required, and it normally does not go beyond global search and replace.

New Feature Released: MAGNAWall IP Address Name Lookup

MAGNAWall Now Supports ipinfo.io API Access

Zenith Elevate is pleased to announce a new feature of MAGNAWall Windows Filtering Platform audit manager: ipinfo.io API look-ups.

With a couple clicks or taps, users can now find basic information about an IP address that appears in their firewall logs, such as company name, geographic location, and other data.

This feature works with or without a subscription to ipinfo.io API access. Without subscription, the results are limited. With subscription, the full set of results becomes available, including Privacy API.

In the future, the array of supported features may be expanded further.

MAGNAWall is a powerful tool by Zenith Elevate, for system administrators, operators, and software developers. It brings Windows Filtering Platforms audit log management under their fingertips and allows log entries to be examined from different angles and new rules to be created/modified. The investigation into blocked or allowed applications and their network access has never been easier than with MAGNAWall: it takes guesswork about which application can or cannot access the network out of the equation.

New Product Announcement: MAGNAWall

MAGNAWall Filtering Platform Audit Manager

Zenith Elevate is pleased to announce the preview availability of its new product: MAGNAWall, a viewer/manager for the audit event logs of the Windows Filtering Platform. It continues and expands on Zenith Elevate’s motto of IMME:

Infrastructure Monitoring/Management Made Easy.

MAGNAWall is the world’s most user-friendly tool that provides security professionals, system administrators, and software developers with unique insights into the network activities on their firewalled devices. By visualizing and filtering audit events logged by the Filtering Platform, it helps pinpoint network activities that require attention.

It proved itself very useful, even during its own development, as it helped immediately visualize its own network activity during the debugging of the access to remote event logs. Without MAGNAWall, it takes mere minutes, to find out which applications or services try to pass through the firewall. With MAGNAWall, it takes only a couple of seconds.

Features

Configures local audit logging, in a single click of a mouse or a touch.
Visualizes and structures local and remote logged events, with source/destination IP addresses and port numbers, executable names, and other data.
Filters records by any permutation of the above data points.
Exports filtered events to Excel, for further analysis.
Command-line interface, for batch scripting.

System requirements

Windows 7 and up; .NET 4; CPU @ 0.8 GHz and up; 40 MB of free memory. Windows Defender firewall or Group Policy firewall must be enabled, in order for the audit policy to capture connections. Elevated privileges are required to access the Security event log.

How to Buy

Us Contact Us form, to request preview access.

New Product Announcement: MAGNAText

MAGNAText SMS/MMS Text Message Sender for VOIP.MS REST API

Zenith Elevate is pleased to announce the preview availability of its new product: MAGNAText. It is a client for VOIP.MS REST API that allows you to send SMS and MMS messages from Windows desktop.

Features

Up to 160-character SMS
Up to 1600-character MMS
Up to 3 MMS attachments of up to 1.3 MB.
All attachment formats supported by VOIP.MS are allowed.
Built-in phone book.
History of sent messages.
Add history entries to the phone book.
Create firewall rule automatically, if necessary.

System requirements

Windows XP and up; .NET 2.0; CPU @ 0.8 GHz and up; 100 MB of free memory. For devices with firewall enabled and outbound connections blocked, a rule will be necessary that allows the application EXE to reach out to VOIP.MS REST API endpoint.

Roadmap

Support other providers.

How to Buy

Visit MAGNAText product page.

New feature released: external IP address check

Today, Zenith Elevate is happy to announce the availability of a new feature that makes MAGNAPing even more powerful and flexible.

MAGNAPing now supports checking for the external IP address of a network for being the same as expected.

In our continuing effort to keep MAGNAPing the most versatile and flexible infrastructure monitoring system on the market, Zenith Elevate is pleased to announce that MAGNAPing now supports a new custom scheme extip:// that uses public API endpoints of user’s choice, to check that the host’s/network gateway’s external IP is the same as expected. Both plain-text and JSON formats or response from the service endpoint are supported.

By using this feature, owners of web sites, web services and other types of public endpoints can ensure that their resources are still accessible via the same, expected IP address or domain name.

New feature released: HTTP certificate expiry check

Today, Zenith Elevate is happy to announce the availability of a new feature that makes MAGNAPing even more powerful and flexible.

MAGNAPing now supports checking for HTTPS certificate expiration through a new custom scheme: HTTPSCert. By using this scheme, one can check certificate expiry on web sites and endpoints of interest. The value to check against is passed as the URL query string parameter. If omitted, it defaults to 30 days in the future or its overriding value from the configuration file. If present, it can take form of days in the future or a specific date.

By using this new scheme, you can stay abreast of HTTPS certificate expiration on your web sites or endpoints and always remain prepared to the pending certificate renewals by way of alerts issued if they near expiry.

Internally, the check is implemented by sending a HEAD request; therefore, it creates minimal load on the target server and transmits minimal network traffic.

From Reactive to Proactive: How Monitoring by MAGNAPing May Improve Reputation

Outages affect not only consumers of IT services. They also affect providers. Every outage leaves a bad taste and deteriorates the provider’s reputation, to a degree. They add up, the more the longer the delay between the moment when an outage is discovered and when business-as-usual is restored.

Over the past decade or so, since the emergence of monitoring and alerting software suites, I have observed, time and time again, that many organizations either do not use them at all or that their coverage is insufficient. One of the reasons is the deployment model of many such suites. Indeed, many are installed in one, central location, sometimes outside of the system; therefore, their monitoring coverage does not equal the map of the information flows in the IT infrastructure being monitored.

On the contrary, MAGNAPing (TM) can be installed right where it matters: at each of the endpoints of every connection, at the source and destination of every communication channel, and at every data consumer and producer. The end result? Increased awareness and transparency, and reduced time to response and resolution.

Example Scenarios

1. RESTful Web Service

A RESTful web service available over HTTPS is consumed by a service application. There is a firewall between these two hosts. MAGNAPing, installed on the consumer service’s host, monitors the RESTful web service at regular intervals that may be adjusted from as short as 1 minute. No later than that interval since when the service goes down, support will be notified of the incident, and it will proceed to investigate and restore BAU. Root causes may include, for example, firewall misconfiguration, physical network failure, server freeze, or VM crash. This consumes one MAGNAPing license.

2. Database Server

The RESTful web service from #1 publishes information from a database server that runs on another host. There is also a firewall between the two. Another instance of MAGNAPing is installed on the RESTful web service’s host, and it monitors the database server. Within minutes of the database connection failure, support is notified. Possible root causes may include DB server misconfiguration or crash, firewall misconfiguration, and other causes including disk full. For the latter, another MAGNAPing instance may be needed. This time it may be installed on the database server itself, but it may also reside anywhere whence the DB server drive space can be monitored. Being very flexible, MAGNAPing helps IT administrators design its deployment in the most convenient way. This consumes one or two MAGNAPing licenses.

3. Service Application

The service application from #1 may be impacted by factors such as drive space, CPU load, and memory utilization, on its own host. If a MAGNAPing instance is installed on it, all these parameters can also be monitored, as well as the status of the service itself. This consumes one more MAGNAPing license.

Conclusion

As I have demonstrated above, the 3 or 4 highly configurable instances of MAGNAPing cover the entire infrastructure and create transparency about its state at all times, from the perspective of each of its constituent components. With its low cost and tiny footprint, MAGNAPing proactively alerts the service owner, before its consumers do. This not only helps to minimize the reputational risk, but it also reduces resource cost of investigation and communication, in the process of restoring BAU. How? Because MAGNAPing provides detailed information about the sources and properties of every failure, including IP/FQDN addresses, times, drive letters/UNC paths, etc. It takes the guesswork out of the recovery process. Imagine that you no longer have to ask your consumers whether their systems are up and running or not, or that you know precisely which of them are up or down!

IT support and operation staff no longer have to log in to many hosts, only to see if they are up and running. They can focus on bringing up the components known to have failed, before consumers even become aware of the outage. For IT organizations, MAGNAPing means reputation saved and resources conserved. At times, the outage may not even be the responsibility of the service provider. MAGNAPing can cover this scenario as well, by alerting the respective 3d party providers.

Is MAGNAPing a magic bullet? It is not, just like no IT solution ever is. MAGNAPing is only as reliable as its communication channel for alerts is. But most of the time, such communication channels are redundant, unlike the IT components being monitored. Overall, MAGNAPing helps its users keep abreast of the state of their infrastructure, most of the time, and this is a huge win over other types of monitoring solutions, needless to say, over no monitoring.

New Product Announcement: MAGNAChat

MAGNAChat Serverless Audio/Video and Instant Messenger

Zenith Elevate is pleased to announce the preview availability of its new product: MAGNAChat. It is a direct, serverless instant messaging, video, and audio software.

Features

Audio/video calls (selectively mutable)
Instant messaging
File transfers
AES encryption (optional)

Unlike mainstream client/server solutions, MAGNAChat provides both security and privacy of all media streams: conversations, videos, messages, and file transfers. Being a .NET 4.8 application, it is fully reverse-engineerable and auditable, for your safety (a permission from Zenith Elevate is required and available upon request).

System requirements

Windows 7 and up; .NET 4.8; 2x CPU cores @ 2 GHz and up; 300 MB of free memory; web camera (for video calls), sound interface, microphone, speakers or headphones (for audio calls); network connections at both ends with UDP port 12345 (italk) mapped to the client PCs.

Roadmap

Rich text messages
Adaptive video resolution adjustment
Custom video backgrounds
STUN protocol support
Conference calls
Video and audio recording

How to Try

To participate in the preview, please use Contact Us form, to register for your free trial copy.

MAGNABoard news: FreeBSD compatibility and more

Since its introduction, MAGNABoard Beta has been developed rapidly, and several Linux distributions (openSUSE, SLES, Debian) as well as FreeBSD have been added.

New functions have also been added. Now, MAGNABoard can perform full system updates of all supported Linux distributions as well as ports tree updates on FreeBSD. It also generates SSH keys for users and exports them to the client.

The UI has been improved with the addition of comments on the registered hosts, OS information tooltips, icons, search, filtering, and more.

Head over to our Store, to grab your free copy of the Beta version!

If you miss functions that are important for you, please use Forums or Contact Us form, to send your feedback. We value it!

Screenshots

New feature released: Linux CPU load and free memory

Today, Zenith Elevate is happy to announce the availability of a new feature that makes MAGNAPing even more powerful and flexible.

MAGNAPing now supports checking for CPU load and free memory on Linux hosts. Two new URL schemes have been made available: freepmeml and cpuloadl. Besides Linux, they support any OS that is available via SSH protocol. The only requirement is for the commands top and grep to be available. Both old-style (KiB) and new-style (MiB) output of top is supported.

What makes MAGNAPing unique?

Among dozens of IT infrastructure monitoring solutions on the market, MAGNAPing is unique because it allows to monitor that which is most important and from where it is most important. Its competitors usually install in a central location; therefore, they provide only a partial view of your infrastructure, by monitoring from a different angle. On the contrary, MAGNAPing’s pricing and licensing model allows it to be right where it is needed: at the point where a possible failure may impact.

IT professionals know that it is critically important to monitor endpoints and connections between them, in the same manner as real-life applications connect. For example, a web application that connects to a database server needs this connection to stay up. It does not help if some other host where a monitoring system is deployed still has a connection to the DB but the web application no longer does, or vice versa. By deploying an instance of MAGNAPing on the same host as the web application you keep an eye on the connection that is important. This also helps to avoid false positives.

With their low cost, flexibility, and low memory and CPU footprint, MAGNAPing instances can be sprinkled over your infrastructure, to keep their watchful eyes on the resources necessary to keep your business going. You only have to seat back and watch your inbox for alerts that will hopefully come seldom if ever.