IPMONITOR NETWORK…

                                  IPMONITOR

              NETWORK MONITORING TOOL
ipMonitor Corporation's ipMonitor V7.5 is a full-featured, sophisticated and cost-
effective network watchdog. It scales extremely well and has an amazingly
intuitive user interface.
by Barry Nance, Network Testing Labs


Finding a good network monitoring tool that actually monitors everything on your
network isn't as easy as you might think ­ or might need. For instance, Microsoft's
MOM software can stand guard over Windows server activity, but it can't track switches,
routers and other devices. Similarly, Ipswitch's What's Up Gold can detect device and
server outages but can't warn you when a server process or server component is failing.
The perfect network, server and application monitor immediately alerts you when outages
occur, pinpoints the root cause of the outage and helps you reestablish communications
tout-de-suite. The tool will, in certain situations, even fix the problem for you
automatically. An ideal tool can produce useful reports showing utilization trends, outage
statistics, Service Level Agreement (SLA) compliance breaches and other information. A
perfect tool is easy to use, scales well, integrates with network management systems,
handles any and all protocols and supports just about every computing environment.
ipMonitor Corporation claims its new ipMonitor V7.5 product meets these criteria. We
decided to put ipMonitor V7.5 to the test in our network lab to verify the vendor's claims.
ipMonitor met or exceeded our expectations in every category, emerging from the tests
with flying colors. ipMonitor contains a wealth of features and can closely monitor
virtually every networking device, server or activity. It sports a responsive and intuitive
user interface, scales well and offers highly useful reports. ipMonitor 7.5 easily wins the
Network Testing Labs World Class Award for best network monitoring and alerting tool.


Monitoring, alerting and correcting
ipMonitor keeps watch over devices, applications, databases and servers. For example, it
can tirelessly and faithfully monitor Windows server (NT, 2000, XP, 2003), Microsoft
Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle relational databases, Dell servers and
networking equipment, Hewlett Packard servers, Cisco routers, Foundry Networks
switches, APC back-up power protection systems and NetBotz environmental monitors.
Our tests showed that ipMonitor is specifically geared to help network administrators
maintain high availability, responsiveness and application/server performance quality.
The tool can even generate synthetic transactions to ensure critical business applications
are operating and behaving normally. The components for monitoring Windows-based
servers also keep tabs on Services, event log entries, free disk space, Active Directory,
Kerberos and specific key files that you designate. ipMonitor keeps tabs on Unix-based
servers via ICMP/ping and via the network protocol streams emitted by the Unix-based
servers.
The intelligent ipMonitor components for monitoring devices (infrastructure) measure
network activity for such protocols as HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, POP3, IMAP4, ICMP/ping,
SNMP, HTML/ASP, SMTP, DNS, Lotus Notes, LDAP, RADIUS, Telnet and SNPP.
ipMonitor also supplies a useful and accurate network bandwidth measurement.
Its alerting feature is a strong point in favor of ipMonitor. When the tool detects a Quality
of Service (QoS) degradation, a particular pattern of network traffic, activity levels that
exceed setttable thresholds or a server or application failure, ipMonitor will let you know
via e-mail, SMS, pager, wireless device and network broadcast. ipMonitor supports
UCP/SMS text messaging. The SMS Text Pager Alert can use UCP (Universal Computer
Protocol) to send an Alert to your alphanumeric pager or digital phone with SMS support.
It also integrates with your help desk software to issue and track trouble tickets. You can
embed scheduling information in its alerts and ipMonitor can escalate alerts to make sure
problems do not get overlooked or inadvertently ignored.
Avoiding problems is always a good idea, and ipMonitor's QoS, disk space, valid link,
event log and SNMP modules can trigger alerts even before a failure actually occurs.
ipMonitor takes corrective action to solve many types of problems. Its automatic recover
feature can run an external program, reboot a server or restart a Service.


Ease of use, reports and scalability
ipMonitor offers an extremely useful network scan (discovery) action for locating
applications, servers, devices and services on part or all of a network. The scan feature
makes quick work of telling ipMonitor which network entities it should track, and the
discovery methods are an accurate, comprehensive and configurable mix of DNS,
ICMP/ping, SNMP and TCP/UDP port scanning operations. ipMonitor groups the results
by IP address or domain name, and it helpfully suggests what to monitor based on its
findings during the scan.
The browser-based Web interface is a highly configurable, responsive and easy to
navigate view into ipMonitor.
Designed for large installations consisting of many thousands of monitored entities,
ipMonitor's filter interface makes quick work of locating and managing similar objects.
An administrator can easily enable, suspend, disable, delete or add monitored entries to
ipMonitor's named groups. It even supports searching via regular expressions.
ipMonitor reports show both real-time and historical data. Live Status reports display the
current, up-to-the-minute health and status of servers, applications and devices, while
historical reports (for time periods you specify) and recent activity reports (last 24 hours)
reveal trends, help with problem follow-up and quantify your network's uptime and
availability. The reports detail such information as uptime, response time and failure
durations. ipMonitor can send automatically-generated reports to e-mail addresses you
specify, and changing the layout and content of reports with ipMonitor's report design
feature is child's play.
Impressively, instances of ipMonitor running on a network can coordinate with each
other. Even more impressively, ipMonitor boasts a SOAP (Simple Object Access
Protocol) interface for managing ipMonitor instances across an enterprise. With just a
small computer programming effort (using, for example, .NET, J2EE, perl, C++ or
Visual Basic), we found we could easily add, edit, delete and view configuration
elements and associated objects throughout ipMonitor's domain of monitored objects.
We could also access real-time status information via the SOAP interface.
We were pleasantly surprised to find ipMonitor offers a pop-up window for displaying
the XML (Extensible Markup Language) schemas for monitored objects, groups, profiles
and alerts. ipMonitor can import and export configuration parameters and their
relationships in XML form.
Security is ipMonitor's forté. It sports the use of SSL (Secure Socket Layer), certificates
and credentials, password-challenge authentication methods, IP address filters and
delegated administrative accounts.
Installation is a simple process. ipMonitor's printed documentation, a 372-page
Administrator's Guide, is clear and comprehensive.


Conclusion
ipMonitor has matured into a full-featured, sophisticated network monitoring and alerting
tool. When uptime and availability are critical, we recommend you look closely at
ipMonitor. It's a highly flexible, comprehensive tool that excels at early problem
detection, often fixes problems without human intervention, is robust, reliable and
scalable, produces highly useful reports, is easy to use and is priced right.
Testbed and Methodology
We ran the ipMonitor software product on a Windows XP-based Dell Latitude D505
computer equipped with a 1.5 GHz Pentium processor, 512 Mb RAM and 30 Gb hard
drive.
The testbed network of six Fast Ethernet segments contained a NetWare 5.0, Windows
NT 4.0 or Windows 2000 file server, an Oracle 8i, Microsoft SQL Server or Sybase
Adaptive Server database server, a Netscape or Internet Information Server (IIS) Web
server and 100 Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT, Windows XP, Windows 2000,
Macintosh System 8, and Red Hat Linux 6.2 clients. The six-segment network also
contained SNMP-aware switches, Cisco routers, T1 Internet links, back-to-back Frame
Relay DSU/CSUs and RMON I/II hardware probes. An Agilent Advisor protocol
analyzer eavesdropped on the network traffic to reveal both overall utilization and the
content detail of network traffic.
In our tests, we primarily looked for the ability to monitor the health and availability of
our servers, operating systems, applications and network devices. The ability to resolve a
problem automatically was a plus. We tested the sending of problem notifications by
pager, e-mail and SNMP alerts (traps). We expected ipMonitor to produce reports that
helped establish baselines, show current and historical server, application and operating
system problems, identify trends and avoid future problems. Ease of use was a significant
criterion.
Report Card
Grade scale is A through F, with F = Failing and A = Perfect


                     Category                ipMonitor Corporation
                  and weight (%)                 ipMonitor 7.5
    Monitoring and analysis (30%)                      A
    Notifications and taking action (30%)              A
    Ease of use (20%)                                  A
    Reports (10%)                                      A
    Documentation and Installation (10%)               A
    Overall score                                      A


Vendor Details
ipMonitorV7.5
Price: starts at $995.00 for 500 Monitors
ipMonitor Corporation
15 Gamelin Blvd., Suite 500
Gatineau, Quebec, Canada J8Y 1V4
Tel: 819.772.4772
www.ipmonitor.com
About the Author
Barry Nance is a networking expert, magazine columnist, book author and application
architect. He has more than 29 years experience with IT technologies, methodologies and
products. Over the past dozen years, working on behalf of Network Testing Labs, he has
evaluated thousands of hardware and software products for ComputerWorld, BYTE
Magazine, Government Computer News, PC Magazine, Network Computing, Network
World and many other publications. He's authored thousands of magazine articles as well
as popular books such as Introduction to Networking (4th Edition), Network
Programming in C and Client/Server LAN Programming.
He's also designed successful e-commerce Web-based applications, created database and
network benchmark tools, written a variety of network diagnostic software utilities and
developed a number of special-purpose networking protocols.
You can e-mail him at barryn@erols.com.


About Network Testing Labs
Network Testing Labs performs independent technology research and product
evaluations. Its network laboratory connects myriads of types of computers and virtually
every kind of network device in an ever-changing variety of ways. Its authors are
networking experts who write clearly and plainly about complex technologies and
products.
Network Testing Labs' experts have written hardware and software product reviews,
state-of-the-art analyses, feature articles, in-depth technology workshops, cover stories,
buyer's guides and in-depth technology outlooks. Our experts have spoken on a number
of topics at Comdex, PC Expo and other venues. In addition, they've created industry
standard network benchmark software, database benchmark software and network
diagnostic utilities.