Measuring Application Availability,Usage and Performance : Implementation of EnView System

The main objective for this degree project is to implement an Application Availability Monitoring (AAM) system named Softek EnView for Fujitsu Services. The aim of implementing the AAM system is to proactively identify end user performance problems, such as application and site performance, before the actual end users experience them. No matter how well applications and sites are designed and nomatter how well they meet business requirements, they are useless to the end users if the performance is slow and/or unreliable. It is important for the customers to find out whether the end user problems are caused by the network or application malfunction. The Softek EnView was comprised of the following EnView components: Robot, Monitor, Reporter, Collector and Repository. The implemented system, however, is designed to use only some of these EnView elements: Robot, Reporter and depository. Robots can be placed at any key user location and are dedicated to customers, which means that when the number of customers increases, at the sametime the amount of Robots will increase. To make the AAM system ideal for the company to use, it was integrated with Fujitsu Services’ centralised monitoring system, BMC PATROL Enterprise Manager (PEM). That was actually the reason for deciding to drop the EnView Monitor element. After the system was fully implemented, the AAM system was ready for production. Transactions were (and are) written and deployed on Robots to simulate typical end user actions. These transactions are configured to run with certain intervals, which are defined collectively with customers. While they are driven against customers’ applicationsautomatically, transactions collect availability data and response time data all the time. In case of a failure in transactions, the robot immediately quits the transactionand writes detailed information to a log file about what went wrong and which element failed while going through an application. Then an alert is generated by a BMC PATROL Agent based on this data and is sent to the BMC PEM. Fujitsu Services’ monitoring room receives the alert, reacts to it according to the incident management process in ITIL and by alerting system specialists on critical incidents to resolve problems. As a result of the data gathered by the Robots, weekly reports, which contain detailed statistics and trend analyses of ongoing quality of IT services, is provided for the Customers.

Mått för att mäta kodkvalitet undersystemutvecklingsprocessen

Viljan att hålla en hög kvalitet på den kod som skrivs vid utveckling av system och applikationerär inte något nytt i utvecklingsvärlden. Flera större företag använder sig av olika mått för attmäta kvaliteten på koden i sina system med målet att hålla en hög driftsäkerhet.Trafikverket är en statlig myndighet som ansvarar för driften av bland annat de system somhåller igång Sveriges järnvägsnät. Eftersom systemen fyller en viktig del i att säkra driften ochse till att tågpositioner, planering av avgångar och hantering av driftstörningar fungerar dygnetrunt för hela landet anser de att det är viktigt att sträva efter att hålla en hög kvalitet påsystemen.Syftet med det här examensarbetet var att ta reda på vilka mått som kan vara möjliga attanvända under systemutvecklingsprocessen för att mäta kvaliteten på kod och hur måtten kananvändas för att öka kvaliteten på IT-lösningar. Detta för att redan på ett tidigt stadie kunnamäta kvaliteten på den kod som skrivs i både befintliga och nyutvecklade system.Studien är en fallstudie som utfördes på Trafikverket, de olika måtten som undersöktes varcode coverage, nivån på maintainability index och antalet inrapporterade incidenter för varjesystem. Mätningar utfördes på sju av Trafikverkets system som i analysen jämfördes motantalet rapporterade incidenter. Intervjuer utfördes för att ge en bild över hur arbetssättet vidutveckling kan påverka kvaliteten. Genom litteraturstudier kom det fram ett mått som inte kundeanvändas praktiskt i det här fallet men är högst intressant, detta är cyclomatic complexity somfinns som en del av maintainability index men som även separat påverkar möjligheten att skrivaenhetstest.Resultaten av studien visar att måtten är användbara för ändamålet men bör inte användassom enskilda mått för att mäta kvalitet eftersom de fyller olika funktioner. Det är viktigt attarbetssättet runt utveckling genomförs enligt en tydlig struktur och att utvecklarna både harkunskap om hur man arbetar med enhetstest och följer kodprinciper för strukturen. Tydligakopplingar mellan nivån på code coverage och inflödet av incidenter kunde ses i de undersöktasystemen där hög code coverage ger ett lägre inflöde av incidenter. Ingen korrelation mellanmaintainability index och incidenter kunde hittas.

Existential issues in surgical care : Nurses’ experiences and attitudes in caring for patients with cancer

The overall aim of this thesis was to explore surgical nurses’ experiences of being confronted with patients’ existential issues when caring for patients with cancer, and to examine whether an educational intervention may support nurses in addressing existential needs when caring for patients with cancer. Previously recorded discussions from supervision sessions with eight healthcare professionals were analysed (I), written descriptions of critical incidents were collected from 10 nurses, and interviews with open questions were conducted (II). An educational intervention on existential issues was pilot tested and is presented in Studies III and IV. The intervention was the basis of a pilot study with the purpose of testing whether the whole design of the educational intervention, including measurements instruments, is appropriate. In Study III and IV interviews with 11 nurses were conducted and 42 nurses were included in the quantitative measurements of four questionnaires, which were distributed and collected. Data was analysed using qualitative secondary analysis (I), hermeneutical analysis (II), and mixed methods using qualitative content analysis and statistical analyses (III-IV). Results in all studies show that existential issues are part of caring at surgical wards. However, although the nurses were aware of them, they found it difficult to acknowledge these issues owing to for example insecurity (I-III), a strict medical focus (II) and/or lacking strategies (I-III) for communicating on these issues. Modest results from the pilot study are reported and suggest beneficial influences of a support in communication on existential issues (III). The results indicate that the educational intervention may enhance nurses’ understanding for the patient’s situation (IV), help them deal with own insecurity and powerlessness in communication (III), and increase the value of caring for severely ill and dying patients (III) in addition to reducing work-related stress (IV). An outcome of all the studies in this thesis was that surgical nurses consider it crucial to have time and opportunity to reflect on caring situations together with colleagues. In addition, descriptions in Studies III and IV show the value of relating reflection to a theory or philosophy in order for attitudes to be brought to awareness and for new strategies to be developed.

Coronary angiography observations: evidence-based or ritualistic practice?

Objective: The purposes of this study were to describe the incidence and occurrence of femoral artery bleeding during the first 6 hours after coronary angiography and to determine whether there is a relationship between  current postangiogram observation protocols and the detection of  complications.

Design: This was a prospective descriptive study.

Setting: The study was conducted in 3 university hospitals in Melbourne, Australia.

Patients: Subjects included 55 patients representing the complication rate of 1075 patients, mean age 61 years (SD, 12), 69% male.

Results: About 5.1% of patients had 1 or more incidents of bleeding  requiring manual compression. In 4.2% of patients, bleeding occurred within 6 hours of angiography. Bleeding occurred a median of 2.02 hours (Q1 = 45 minutes, Q3 = 4.31 hours) after angiography. Patients without pressure bandaging bled a median of 1.32 hours (Q1 = 36.50 minutes, Q3 = 2.59 hours) after angiography. Patients with pressure bandaging bled a median of 4.75 hours (Q1 = 2.25 hours, Q3 = 7.28 hours) after angiography. In 40.6% of cases, bleeding was detected through the patient’s call for assistance, and in 59.4% of cases nurses noted bleeding while checking the puncture site. Postcatheter observations were recorded 23.70 (SD, 14.60) minutes before the bleeding incident. There were no significant changes in vital signs, systolic blood pressure (P > .05), diastolic blood pressure (P > .05), or pulse (P > .05) before or during a bleeding episode. All were within normal parameters. No neurovascular assessment anomalies were detected.

Conclusion: The use of pressure bandaging has a significant effect on the incidence and pattern of bleeding. Routine vital sign measurement has no relevance in detecting local complications after angiography. The most significant complication is bleeding that requires manual compression. Detection is through frequent puncture site observation and patient recognition and communication.

Media/ting change: the print media's role in mediating education policy in a period of radical reform in Victoria, Australia

This paper draws upon critical discourse analysis, cultural studies and communication theory, studies on media and educational reform, and the work of Bernstein, Bourdieu and Luhmann in particular, to explore how the print and media 'mediated' a period of educational change marked by moves to self-management in schools in Victoria, Australia. It considers how the media was mobilized by various education stakeholders, and in turn informed relations between schools and government, through policy discourses and texts. It considers why and how particular themes became media 'issues', how schools and teachers responded to these issues, and how the media was used by various stakeholders in education to shape policy debates. It is based on a year-long qualitative study that explored critical incidents and representations about education in the print media over a year in the daily press. It illustrates the ways in which a neo-liberal Victorian government mobilized the media to gain strategic advantage to promote radical education reform policies, considers the media effects of this media/tion process on schools and teachers, and conceptualizes how school and system performance is fed from and into media representations, public perceptions and community understandings of schools and teachers' work.

Protect grids from DDoS attacks

Recently a number of highly publicised incidents of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have made people aware of the importance of providing available securely the grids’ data and services to users. This paper introduces the vulnerability of grids to DDoS attacks, and proposes a distributed defense system that has a mixture deployment of sub-systems to protect grids from DDoS attacks. According to the simulation experiments, this system is effective to defend grids against attacks. It can avoid overall network congestion and provide more resources to legitimate grid users.

Understanding parental motivators and barriers to uptake of child poison safety strategies: a qualitative study

Objectives: To develop an understanding of factors acting as barriers and motivators to parental uptake of child poison safety strategies.

Design: A qualitative study involving semistructured interviews and focus groups. A grounded theory approach was used for the collection and analysis of data.

Participants: Sixty five parents of children under 5 years of age, some of whom had experienced an unintentional child poisoning incident.

Results: A range of knowledge based, environmental, and behavioral barriers to comprehensive parental uptake of poison safety practices were identified. As a result there tended to be only partial implementation of safety initiatives in the home. Selection of safety practices was often guided by the interests and behaviors of the child. This made the child vulnerable to changes in the home environment, inadequate supervision, and/or shifts in their own behavior and developmental ability. Personal or vicarious exposure of a parent to a child poisoning incident was a significant motivator for parental review of safety practices.

Conclusion: Environmental measures targeting child resistant containers, warning labels, and lockable poisons cupboards will support parents’ efforts to maintain poison safety. Additional education campaigns using stories of actual poisoning incidents may help to increase awareness of risk and encourage increased uptake.

Protecting web applications from DDoS attacks by an active distributed defense system

In the last a few years a number of highly publicized incidents of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against high-profile government and commercial websites have made people aware of the importance of providing data and services security to users. A DDoS attack is an availability attack, which is characterized by an explicit attempt from an attacker to prevent legitimate users of a service from using the desired resources. This paper introduces the vulnerability of web applications to DDoS attacks, and presents an active distributed defense system that has a deployment mixture of sub-systems to protect web applications from DDoS attacks. According to the simulation experiments, this system is effective in that it is able to defend web applications against attacks. It can avoid overall network congestion and provide more resources to legitimate web users.

An analysis of CSI/FBI and AusCERT surveys

The paper responds to the release of both the AusCERT and CSI/FBI computer crime and security surveys with a comparison of the results between the two countries' respondents. Overall both surveys show the trend that most organisations employ security technologies but half of them still experience incidents which compromise their security. These incidents have significant quantifiable losses but despite these organisations are still loathed to report to law enforcement agencies for various reasons. These include the impression that law enforcement agencies are not interested, and the negative publicity such incidents can cause in their aftermath.

Reliable event transfer in wireless sensor networks deployed for emergency response

Sensor Networks have applications in diverse fields. They can be deployed for habitat modeling, temperature monitoring and industrial sensing. They also find application in battlefield awareness to sense chemicals and other gases used in chemical and biological warfare. An application that has become increasingly attractive in the post 9/11 era is the use of wireless sensor networks for emergency (first) response in mass casualty incidents. Reliability of data and event transfer is of critical importance to emergency response applications. In this work we propose a reliable event transfer mechanism making use of an overlay network of relay nodes. The overlay network removes the burden of data relaying from the sensor nodes and results in increasing the lifetime of the network. Simulation results prove the benefits of such an architecture. Reliability is increased 10-30% with reduction in event traffic of 60-80%.

Who speaks on footballers and sexual assault? A gender analysis of sports reporting

The recent spate of sexual assault allegations made against Australian Football League (AFL) players has generated intense media scrutiny and public concern. Following from similar highly publicised allegations directed at the National Rugby League, these incidents have engendered significant debates around sexism and football culture in the popular press. It is the media’s response to allegations of sexual assault made against AFL footballers that will be analysed here. This study offers a content analysis of articles from the sport sections of two major Australian newspapers, The Age and the Herald-Sun, with the aim of assessing the prevalence of women’s perspectives on the issue of player misconduct and whether the gender of the reporter has any bearing on gender stereotyping in sport reporting. By assessing how the phenomenon of player misconduct has been covered in sport news, this paper evaluates the media’s role in changing dominant attitudes and perceptions of gender relations in Australian society.

School, parent, and student perspectives of school drug policies

Background: Schools use a number of measures to reduce harmful tobacco, alcohol, and drug use by students. One important component is the school's drug policy, which serves to set normative values and expectations for student behavior as well as to document procedures for dealing with drug-related incidents. There is little empirical evidence of how policy directly or indirectly influence students' drug taking. This study compares how effectively schools communicate school drug policies to parents and students, how they are implemented, and what policy variables impact students' drug use at school and their perceptions of other students' drug use at school.

Methods: Data were obtained from 3876 students attending 205 schools from 2 states in the United States and Australia, countries with contrasting national drug policy frameworks. School policy data were collected from school personnel, parents, and students.

Results: Schools' policies and enforcement procedures reflected national policy approaches. Parents and students were knowledgeable of their school's policy orientation.

Conclusions: When delivered effectively, policy messages are associated with reduced student drug use at school. Abstinence messages and harsh penalties convey a coherent message to students. Strong harm-minimization messages are also associated with reduced drug use at school, but effects are weaker than those for abstinence messages. This smaller effect may be acceptable if, in the longer term, it leads to a reduction in harmful use and school dropout within the student population.

Fire fighters' assessments of fireground risk

Fire fighters are often required to work in dynamic and hazardous environments involving a high level of uncertainty. The present study investigated 110 volunteer fire fighters’ assessments of levels of risk associated with a photographic depiction of a typical grassland fire situation. The fire fighters used a standard fire agency risk-rating matrix procedure requiring them to specify the severity of the hazards depicted and the probability of a mishap in order to rate overall level of risk (1 = Low; 4 = Extreme). The risk ratings made by the fire fighters varied greatly. The overall rate of agreement with the risk level rating of the situation made by a panel of expert fire officers (=1, Low) was only 27%. It seems that use of a standard risk-rating matrix procedure by fire fighters at incidents, as recommended currently by many fire agencies, is likely to result in unreliable risk assessments, at least in the absence of effective training in the risk assessment procedure. The 110 volunteers were also asked to identify the total number of potential hazards apparent in five photographs depicting different kinds of emergency incidents. Identifying more hazards was found to be associated with (a) previous personal experience of a ‘near-miss’; and (b) higher levels of education. The findings imply that when faced with identical fire ground situations, individual fire fighters are likely to differ in their situational awareness of hazards and consequent risk assessments.

Reflective thinking : turning a critical incident into a topic for research

Clinical nurses encounter critical incidents every day.  While these may be a source of frustration they also have the potential to be turned into research projects so that problems can be examined and others can learn from them.  This paper describes the reflective process used to generate a research project from a critical incident encountered in the clinical area.

Patient safety, ethics and whistleblowing : a nursing response to the events at the Campbelltown and Camden Hospitals

In November 2002, in what stands as one of the most significant whistleblowing cases in the history of the Australian health care system, four nurses went public with concerns they had about the management of clinical incidents and patient safety at two hospitals in Sydney, New South Wales. The handling of this case and its aftermath raises important moral questions concerning the nature of whistleblowing in health care domains and the possible implications for the patient safety and quality of care movement in Australia. This paper presents an overview of the case, the moral risks associated with whistleblowing, and some lessons learned.