I would begin, perhaps gratuitously, with the interesting tidbit that NerveCenter was first created by a company called Netlabs - while a fellow by the name of St. Larry Wall worked there. It's got his holy fingerprints all over it's conceptual design :)

Since the mid-90's NerveCenter has been a well-regarded application that, while having a few warts, did it's job reasonably well. OpenService bought it from VERITAS in 2002 and supposedly has spent the time fixing bugs and improving the architecture.

I've been working with an older version for several years, and for the most part it worked as advertised. We recently upgraded to the newest to take advantage of better scalability and some new features.

Problem is, they've taken a useful (though esoteric) tool and made it so brittle as to be almost unusable.

To use an analogy: It's like a car jack that can lift 2000lbs, and it works fine as long as you don't shake the car or forget to lock the handle down. You get underneath and do your work with a reasonable assurance you won't get flattened.

Now you need to lift 5000lbs so you buy the newest jack which is made for heavier lifting. It can do the job, so long as you don't even breathe on the vehicle you need to work on. And by the way, nobody knows for sure if the handle lock is working or not.

OK, so that's my rant.

The situation I face is that I'm stuck with this product, the vendor support is less-than-stellar, and my boss believes I'm the one causing the issues. If I can show him that the issues we're having do not stem from my code then I may have something I can use to either force OpenService to fix what's broken or get the PHB to push for a breach-of-contract or something. On the flip side, if the problem *is* my code, I want to know, because most of my job is to know the idiosyncrasies of our applications inside and out and keep things running smooth.

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