ActiveXperts Network Monitor

ActiveXperts Network Monitor - Leading solution for monitoring all aspects of your LAN and WAN servers ActiveXperts Network Monitor is a network and server monitoring tool that allows administrators to monitor the network for failures and irregularities automatically. It can monitor all aspects of your LAN- and WAN servers, workstations and IP devices.
For years, System Administrators, Network Operators and Helpdesk Employees have relied upon the power, flexibility and reliability of the ActiveXperts Network Monitor tool.

ActiveXperts' powerful Network Monitor Engine technology has been adopted by several software companies all over the world. ActiveXperts' Network Monitoring technologies is used by thousands of companies all over the world, making ActiveXperts the leading provider of Network Monitoring solutions.

The mission of the product is to maximize the reliability of your production servers and applications through the automatic detection and correction of problems and issues.

The product runs as a service on the Windows 2003/2000/XP/NT platform. ActiveXperts Network Monitor supports Windows, UNIX, Linux and Novell platforms. When problems are detected, you're immediately notified by network message, e-mail or SMS message. When a failure is detected, the network monitor tool will try to correct the problem.

Network Monitor Engine (a Windows service)
The Network Monitor Engine is the service that continuously monitors the servers in your LAN/WAN for availability. The service is also responsible for notifying, triggering actions, recovery and logging. The engine is multi-threaded, capable of monitoring many servers simultaneously. It can monitor various platforms, including Windows, Novell, Linux and Unix. It has many built-in monitor checks. Operators can write new checks in VBScript or RSH and add these to the configuration.
There's no agent software required on the servers being monitored; the monitoring service uses protocols and application layers of the Operating System to do its job.

ActiveXperts Network Monitor includes many built-in monitor checks. You can add new monitor check routines yourself, using VBScript. This is explained in the online Network Monitor VBScript Guidelines.

Network Monitor Manager
The Network Monitor Manager application is used to view the results and to make changes to the configuration. This Manager application allows you to visually monitor the network from any desktop PC.

Use the Network Monitor Manager application to view results and to make changes to the configuration

The Manager application can be installed on any Windows 98, Windows NT or higher computer (workstation or server), and has different authority levels. You can restrict help desk employees to only view results, while you can allow network operators to make changes to the configuration.

Web Interface
The Web Interface is a collection of read-only XML based Views of the network. They can be viewed by an Internet Browser by the use of XSL style sheets. This only requires one port on the firewall (default: port 80) to allow monitoring the network from a remote location. The Web Interface pages can be customized by editing the XSL style sheets. It is very easy to configure the XSL style sheets, for instance to change: colors, sorting, listed items, column and row sizes, and more. This is a unique feature of ActiveXperts Network Monitor, and very often used by the HelpDesk staff.

Here are some key features of "ActiveXperts Network Monitor":
Monitoring features

Monitors various operating systems, including Windows, Novell, UNIX and LINUX;

Monitors web servers using HTTP and HTTPs protocols. Supports NTLM authentication, proxy servers and proxy authentication;

Monitors mail servers. Supports SMTP/Pop3 servers, including Lotus Notes, MS Exchange and native SMTP/POP3 servers;

Monitors IP protocols. ActiveXperts Network can monitor a wide range of IP protocols, including ICMP Ping, FTP, SNMP v1, SNMP v2c, LDAP, NTP and NNTP;

Monitors various databases, including Oracle, MS SQL, MS Access, SyBase, Informix, Paradox and IBM DB2. It supports the ODBC, ADO and OLE-DB interfaces to monitor a wide range of databases;

Monitors event logs; filter on event sources, event ID's, etc. Match patterns in event descriptions;

Monitors disk availability and disk space. It can monitor the physical status of a disk array of an individual disk. It can monitor availability and/or used space on a physical or logical disk;

Monitors services, processes, memory usage. It can monitor the status of a Windows service, check if a process is running on a remote machine, and check the amount of consumed memory of the individual process;

Monitors users, groups, Active Directory and Novell NDIS. Support for ADSI and allows you to monitor Microsoft- and Novell Directory Services, including Microsoft Active Directory and Novell NDS;

Monitors environment. Requires an Environmental Monitoring device from Sensatronics to monitor temperature, humidity and/or water leaks ('wetness');

Custom Network Monitoring. You can add new checks by writing scripts. You can use VBScript (Windows) or RSH (UNIX) for it. VBScript checks can use WMI and ADSI;

Enterprise class architecture. The product consists of a network monitoring service (the 'Engine') and a separate management interface (called 'Manager'). Administrators can monitor enterprise-wide networks from a single console where no agent software is required;

Monitoring engine is self-tuning; the number of active threads adapt to the number of rules to be processed per minute.

Software is provided with powerful, pre-defined checks.

User Interface - Windows application and Web Interface

The Manager application is used to make changes to the configuration and view results;

The Manager application can be installed on any workstation in the network, enabling operators to monitor and configure from their desktop;

The Manager application has an Explorer-like user interface, with a Folder pane, a Monitor Rules pane and an Activity pane;

Assign Read-only permission to people who do not need full access to the configuration. In Read-only mode, users can only view the results, but are not able to change the configuration.

ActiveXperts Network Monitor allows you to view the status of the network from anywhere in the world using the Web Interface. IT Administrators can use a normal browser for it, but can also use small handheld devices such as an HP iPad or a Palm PDA device. The Web Interface is based on XML and XSL technology.

Notification features

Send out notifications upon failure and upon recovery;

Support for SMTP e-mail notifications without needing Outlook or IIS/CDONT;

NetBIOS Network Notifications (the well-known "network popup" messages);

SMS Notifications through an SMSC ("Short Message Service Center") provider; requires a normal Hayes compatible modem connected to the monitoring server;

SMS Notifications through a GSM mobile phone; requires a GSM phone connected to the monitoring server through a serial cable, InfraRed or BlueTooth; the GSM phone must be capable of processing AT+C commands;

SMS Notifications through a GSM modem (recommended); requires a GSM modem connected to the monitoring server through a serial or USB cable; ActiveXperts recommends WaveCom M1306B modems;

SNMP trap notifications. Support for SNMP v1 and SNMP v2c traps;

Distribution Groups and individual recipients; You can define multiple Distribution Groups and assign them to your rules, but you can also use individual recipients for a rule;

Templates for all notification types, including Network Monitor system parameters inside these templates; Notification messages can be completely customized using these templates;

Test buttons for each notification type, for troubleshooting purposes.

Action features

Restart a service (or multiple services) upon failure;

Reboot a server upon failure;

Launch an executable or batch command job; Network Monitor system parameters can be passed;

Launch a VBScript; Network Monitor system parameters can be passed;

Sample actions included.

Configuration

All configuration information is stored in one file, which makes it easy to backup, import and export;

Import and Export are guided by a 'wizard';

Default values for new Monitor Rules are configurable;

Default values can be applied to existing Monitor Rules;

Read-only mode for users that are not allowed to make changes to the configuration (for instance: help desk employees);

Maintenance schedules

Avoid servers to be considered as 'failed' during maintenance schedules. Notifications will not be sent during maintenance;

Maintenance schedules can be configured globally or per server;

Maintenance schedules can be scheduled as recurrent or only once.

You can define multiple schedules.

Dependencies

Avoid a flood of messages when - for instance - a router fails, by configuring dependencies;

Servers can depend one multiple servers; dependencies are transitive.

Reports

Standard incident reports and summary reports included;

Support for simple HTML and CSV ('comma separated') reports;

Support for enhanced XML and XSL based reports;

Servers can be included/excluded from a report;

Report generation is guided by a 'Wizard';

Logging

Network Monitor related information is written to the Application Log of the Event Viewer;

Logging can be written to ASCII files, an MS Access database, MS SQL server or any OLE-DB/ADO compliant database. Product is shipped with an Access database file that works out-of-the-box;

Maximum Log size is configurable.


Requirements:

x86 233 MHz processor or higher

128MB or more

50 MB HD space


Limitations:

30-day fully functional trial

After 30 days, the product will keep on running, but all checks will be disabled except the ICMP- and HTTP based checks.