Getting Started

Maintaining Connect:Direct® Servers is crucial to enterprises to support mission-critical file transfer business processes, while satisfying policy and regulatory compliance requirements.

It involves a variety of routines that stretch between upgrade management, to server management, viewing deployment history, aggregating, correlating, and reporting licensing usage.

Those are some key metrics that administrators rely on to understand and optimize Connect:Direct server performance, plan upgrade, identify bottlenecks early, and resolve issues proactively before they affect end users.

If you are a first-time user, you can get a quick introduction to using IBM® Sterling Control Center Director just by reading the following section.

IBM Sterling Control Center Director, an activity management and monitoring product, helps you meet these critical needs with the following set of features:
  • Discover resources faster
    • After you have installed the required maintenance version of Connect:Direct with Agent, Control Center Director is quick to discover all the Connect:Direct resources in your environment.
    • Connect:Direct Agent is included with the Connect:Direct server when it is at the required level of maintenance for Agent inclusion.
    • With the Control Center Director URL defined during Connect:Direct installation, you can continue to stay updated about automatic re-discoveries of new resources in your environment.
  • License Governance
    • Control Center Director capabilities come in handy for administrators to keep track of Connect:Direct servers deployed in your infrastructure.
    • Tracking assets is an essential capability to achieve greater visibility of your environment's inventory.
    • Competencies like exporting usage reports and viewing license by environment type give greater control to steer inventory management in an effective way.
  • View managed Server's and Agent's status
    • The Dashboard and Servers view on the Control Center Director Web Console displays connections with managed Connect:Direct servers and their availability status.
    • This way, you can view their status and quickly locate faulty resources, instead of having to browse through the entire infrastructure. Once the issue is diagnosed, you can troubleshoot accordingly.
  • Upgrade Management

    Control Center Director options help administrators automate the upgrade process on target Connect:Direct nodes in an organized manner.

  • Server Management
    • Use the Servers view on the Control Center Director Web Console to display connections and dependencies among managed Connect:Direct servers and their relationship with the Server Group, as a whole.
    • This way, you can also associate all discovered resources to the desired Server group and perform the following routines in an organized manner:
      • viewing, modifying server and server group settings
      • defining a server pool and add discovered servers/server groups
      • export server group composition report to steer server management in an effective way
      • remove server/server groups from the server roster