Maximo administrators are frequently multi-disciplined due to the various components that make up a Maximo system and the methods IBM provides to customize, enhance, and interact with the Maximo application.
A tool for interacting with Maximo’s database directly is an obvious requirement, but since Maximo supports a variety of database platforms that complicates things a bit. If your database is running Oracle then Oracle SQL Developer is actually pretty solid, bringing coding tools, import/export capabilities, as well as tools to manage and monitor the Oracle platform itself. Users of SQL Server should give Azure Data Studio a try: it’s a bit more lightweight than SQL Server Management Studio, it’s built on more modern architecture, and it supports themes and extensions. DB2 users or admins that spend a lot of time switching between platforms might want to consider the SQuirreL SQL client, an open-source SQL client that can be used against any major database platform through JDBC.
Postman is a utility for interacting with Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). In Maximo, this is useful for interacting with multiple APIs (REST, JSON, OSLC) either for testing system interfaces or potentially for loading or interacting with Maximo data. One Postman alternative we like is the Nightingale REST Client.
There are several reasons to have a powerful text editor in your toolkit (manipulating text data, automation scripts, or SQL queries to name a few) and fortunately, there are a number of good options available for free. Notepad++ is one of the more popular and mature open-source text editors out there, with a bunch of extensions and themes available, support for an impressive array of languages/formats, and utilities to change character encoding or do advanced text replacement using regular expressions.
Log files are a necessary evil for any application or service, and Maximo is no exception. Often the most efficient method of monitoring a log file is through a technique called tailing, which allows you to monitor as events are added to a log file, even allowing you to monitor multiple files or highlight log lines based on rules you define. There are a number of popular log tailing tools out there, but our favorites include BareTail and mTail.
Tim Ferrill
IBM Maximo Solutions Consultant
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