In my real-life job as a systems and network engineer I was given
a task of finding a product that would monitor both my netwerkin stuff
so far as ports and stats, as well as Windows server processes, and
concentrate on things that don't cost an arm and a leg and a co-worker's
salary per year. Well, there went HP Openview.
So I evaluated a dozen or so and found a suprise find that
I can't recommend, but might be worth checking out. It's not quite
for a co-location company, and not quite for a Fortune 500 company,
but for the smaller shops I thought it worth at least mentioning.
I can't recommend it because it's HostMonitor 5 from KS Software.
http://www.ks-soft.net on your internet dial. I've not found much on
the company and near as I can tell it's probably one guy coding late
into the night in his PJ's with a bottle of vodka at his side and
muttering swear words at Microsoft in Russian. Or maybe that's just me.
On the other hand, his HostMonitor product beat the crap out
of stuff costing twenty times the price, per year, and though it's
not the prettiest web-page, giving the health of your NOC for under
$1000 I can live with ugly web pages, log to a SQL server, and make
my own pretty reports for manglement.
On the netwerkin' side you have to supply the MIB to query.
That's a pain when you've routers with 20 different interfaces since
this doesn't automatically identify them as Int FastEthernet0/0 on a
Cisco 3745. Frankly, I don't care about that so much as this thing
will query Windows Perfmon stats. Want to know CPU usage? It's
there. Want to scan event logs? It's there. Want to telnet to
port 27015 and look for a response? It's there. How about the status
of a single process that isn't a service? It's there.
Alerts can be escalated, yadda yadda yadda. Read the fluff on the
web page above. I don't buy all that stuff either, and I'm still
playing with it against my own network, but at this sort of price
I can afford to do at least premliminary scans with it and use the
more specific tools for other tasks and save on licensing fees.
The support for external batch files, VB scripts, and such
are just icing on the cake.
Just thought I'd throw it out there for your consideration.
I've no connection with the company, never even knew they existed
prior to a couple of weeks ago, and honestly I think other products
do it better. But at his prices I don't care if I get a license
and he has a heart attack tomorrow, I'm saving a wad of cash over
the flashier products and that makes me look good on mahogany row.
- Dan
* Dan Sorenson DoD #1066 A.H.M.C. #35 [EMAIL PROTECTED] *
* Vikings? There ain't no vikings here. Just us honest farmers. *
* The town was burning, the villagers were dead. They didn't need *
* those sheep anyway. That's our story and we're sticking to it. *
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