Rocket MultiValue Performance Experience (MVX: Performance) v1.8 now available, making it even easier to monitor replication, strengthening your HA/DR capabilities

October 24, 2023

According to Mary Schulz, Sr. Product Manager at Rocket Software, “This is the second MVX: Performance release focused on improving replication as part of a MultiValue High Availability/Disaster Recovery (HA/DR) strategy.”

From a high availability perspective, replication allows customers to perform off-line reporting analysis on a subscriber system without impeding high-volume transactional operations​ on the publishing system. Replication also allows production maintenance and upgrades with no downtime by allowing IT to redirect its production environment (i.e., publisher) to a subscriber. 

In terms of disaster recovery, replication is vital. Have you seen statics showing:​

• 65%+ of businesses involved in a major fire either don’t reopen or fail within three years (Chubb.com)​
• 50% of businesses never return following a major disaster

And, in today’s world, disasters are more than weather-related events and include power failures, hardware failures, and cyberattacks, just to name a few.  ​

This release of MVX: Performance includes a new replication dashboard allowing users to quickly and easily perform replication monitoring tasks to assess, in real time, the health of replication activities. The replication dashboard includes details such as a statistical summary of multiple distributions and identifies the stalled LSN causing a subscription group to stop processing. A stalled LSN has been the number one replication-related support case our customers have submitted.

This version of MVX: Performance provides resolution steps without users having to reinitialize servers. The dashboard also displays trend information such as pacing time behind and time to catch up. In addition, v1.8 features three new replication events:

• Replication disabled event: generated for one event per distribution if any groups are disabled.
• Replication down event: generated if replication is down. It generates one event per distribution.
• Replication up ("Replication Running") event: generated if the previous event is either Replication Disabled or Replication Suspended. It generates one event per distribution.

We updated the Replication Suspended event, first introduced in MVX: Performance 1.7.0, to be generated per replication group.

This release includes other valuable features, such as:

• Graceful handling of instance restarts and version-changes, for example, upgrading from UniVerse 11.3.4 to UniVerse 11.4.1.
• A new Notification Only event alerts customers when a server is down and restarted. This feature was requested by our partners, alerting them to end users who might need assistance after a server goes down.

If you’re in a hurry for an event we haven’t put into the product yet, this version of MVX: Performance is for you since it’s the first release that gives you the ability to create your own custom events for monitoring application-level issues and errors that are not currently offered in the product. This feature won the Denver-regional prize during RocketBuild 2022.

We’re also providing thirteen bug fixes in this release. For more information, please consult the Release Notes. And be sure to check out our new MVX: Performance playlist on our YouTube channel.

The Rocket MultiValue Performance Experience is free to our customers on maintenance. Please note, MVX: Performance 1.8 only works with Rocket® UniVerse 11.4.1. To take advantage of the new monitoring capabilities, plan your upgrade now to Rocket UniVerse 11.4.1. Our team is eager to assist you with any questions or support you may need during the upgrade process. If you are currently on maintenance, you can download Rocket UniVerse 11.4.1 on Rocket Business Connect (RBC). If you do not have an active maintenance contract, please contact our sales team to get started!

Rocket MultiValue maintains a standard Product Lifecycle policy. To view the lifecycle for your version of UniVerse and related tools, review the lifecycle dates and statuses on the Product Availability Matrix (PAM).