ipMonitor 9 Overview

 FEATURES & BENEFITS

ipMonitor 8.5 is a secure, real-time network monitoring software solution you can use to proactively monitor, alert and recover your critical applications, servers and infrastructure equipment

ipMonitor® 8.5 is a web-based network monitoring, notification, recovery, and reporting tool for Internet and Intranet networks. It operates as a Windows® service and runs on Windows 2K/XP/2003 workstations and servers.

ipMonitor’s purpose is to watch over important network resources, in order to ensure availability, responsiveness and performance quality. It does this by regularly monitoring the state of applications, databases, infrastructure equipment and web, commerce and mail servers.

In the event that quality of service degrades, thresholds are exceeded or failures occur, the ipMonitor network monitoring software will immediately alert the right people. In addition recovery options can automatically be initiated to correct problems and recover service.

Proactive Network Monitoring
Because downtime is not an option for organizations, institutions and businesses that must depend on their networks, IT teams need to anticipate problems before they happen and respond quickly when they do. To minimize downtime it is critically important that network monitoring be done proactively - not reactively.

ipMonitor’s low-level toolkit approach to network monitoring provides an advanced suite of adaptable protocol and application level monitors to proactively monitor performance thresholds and parameters of virtually any critical applications or infrastructure equipment.

This degree of monitoring flexibility is required to proactively monitor homogenous networks and distributed applications used to deliver mission critical supply chain, CRM, B2B and Web services.

Agentless Architecture
ipMonitor’s agentless architecture delivers network monitoring that is lightweight, efficient and generates negligible network traffic.

Because ipMonitor does not require agents to be installed across your network, it's quick to set up and easy to maintain - this reduces your total cost of ownership. Typically agents are slow to deploy across a large network, often times this requires scheduling and coordination to access and physically install the agent at each machine, plus agents need to be renewed, maintained and updated.

The TCP/IP protocol, plus mechanisms such as SNMP and attributes that are available from the applications themselves support ipMonitor’s agentless network monitoring. For most organizations the efficiency and savings the agentless architecture provides greatly outweighs any advantages the agent model might promote.

Web Services Monitoring
Web services are used for everything from online banking transactions, to live news portals, to entertainment and shopping - they generate millions of dollars, reach a global audience, and must run 24/7/365.

These mission critical web services have no choice but to proactively monitor availability and performance of the many different components required to serve up content, often times to thousands of concurrent users. Every detail needs to be monitored. For example: Are the web servers serving dynamic content correctly? Are the SQL servers about to run out of disk space? Is the credit card transaction provider online?

The logistics of running a web service entails fail-over systems, redundancy planning, and back-up strategies, plus a capable and reliable network monitoring solution to watch over everything. By using ipMonitor to anticipate problems, corrective action can be taken in advance - and in the event that complications should arise, the problem can be isolated quickly to help the IT team respond assertively.

Secure Network Monitoring
Security has become a major concern for all IP networks. Everyone from the CEO on down is uneasy about the security of vital business assets.

Network monitoring and management technologies face real challenges in regard to network security due to the high degree of access and control these solutions have over key assets, for example legacy SQL databases, file servers and mail systems. To address this very real concern ipMonitor 7 was reengineered from the ground up, integrating protection mechanisms at the lowest level in the software.

To avoid sending account information over the network in clear text, communication is secured by SSL encryption. This also prevents critical information about the network from being transported over open communications channels that may be exposed to eavesdropping and tampering.

A new Credentials Manager that enables each monitor and alert to operate using the "lowest possible" privileges, as well as NTLM and digest authentication, plus IP access filters further improve ipMonitor’s integrated security model.

With security now so critical to the well being of network enabled organizations, network monitoring solutions like ipMonitor that are deployed to watch over the network need to be part of the overall security solution - rather than offering potential for compromise.

Monitor From Either Side of the Firewall
A variety of network monitoring service providers have arrived on the scene offering remote monitoring for web and commerce solutions via the Internet.

Although at first glance, these solutions might appear attractive, they inherently suffer from any Internet related problems and irregularities. Typically these services only enable basic monitoring for IP based protocols such as Ping, HTTP, POP3, DNS, and SMTP. In most cases they have no ability to do application quality assurance monitoring, and lack the dexterity to recover services and applications in the event that a problem occurs.

Those network monitoring service providers that do offer more effective monitoring services require a VPN into your organizations internal network. In which case you have to fully trust the security practices of the network monitoring service provider.

In contrast, ipMonitor provides superior network monitoring whether deployed inside or outside an organizations firewall. Most importantly, with ipMonitor you control security, not an outside provider.

Portability and Productivity Tools
ipMonitor is rich in features designed to increase productivity. For example, inline help located throughout the web interface rolls down when you need it and folds back up when you’re done; interactive pop-up windows make it quick to select certain configuration settings such as tokens used in Alert notifications.

Configuration features to improve efficiency include, a Network Scanner to locate applications, services and devices on the network; a Regex wizard to create and test regular expressions used with Monitors that do content matching for Information Alerts; a pretest feature makes it possible to test each configured Alert to ensure configuration settings are correct; and an interactive SNMP tool is available to view MIBs and extract OID values.

ipMonitor also provides access to configuration data as well as real-time Monitor state information via the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). Using SOAP, you can Add, Edit, Delete, and View configuration elements and their associated object lists from applications developed for .NET or J2EE.

For organizations that require the ability to automatically distribute reports, ipMonitor can send out reports by email to a list of email addresses on scheduled intervals. These are just a few of ipMonitor’s portability and productivity tools that make it possibly the most comprehensive and powerful network monitoring solution in its price range.

Web-Based Accessibility
ipMonitor’s convenient web based interface makes reports, configuration and administration easily accessible from anywhere on the network, from home or on the road. Because SSL is used to encrypt confidential passwords and administrative parameters ipMonitor can be accessed in relative safety from remote via your web browser.

For Network Operations Centers, ipMonitor’s web based interface can be accessed from multiple display units concurrently and a different network view can be displayed on each.

The ability to monitor the state of applications, databases, infrastructure equipment and web, commerce and mail servers in real-time significantly reduces the time it takes to identify and troubleshoot problems. This helps keep operations running smoothly and reduces costly downtime.

Light on Network Traffic
ipMonitor’s agentless architecture and optimized protocol level monitoring techniques provides a very efficient network monitoring model that generates negligible traffic.

When used to monitor applications, servers and infrastructure equipment on a typical network, ipMonitor’s contribution to the overall network traffic will be virtually immeasurable when reasonable probe intervals are accepted during configuration, such as the defaults provided in the software. All monitor types support configurable monitoring parameters and probe intervals.

Most monitor types generate bytes per transaction. Quality Assurance monitors, which work by generating transaction level traffic are most often configured to poll less frequently. For example a HTTP QA monitor might be configured to download a dynamic web page every 5 minutes in order to further minimize network traffic generated by ipMonitor.

Rapid Implementation
ipMonitor's agentless architecture makes deployment quick and easy. In most situations it installs in minutes and monitoring begins in hours - not days or weeks. And, once it’s installed and configured very little ongoing administration effort is required to continue monitoring your network around the clock.

Features such as the "Things to do list" that steps through configuration, and in-line help that displays expandable help throughout the configuration interface help shorten the learning curve.

A Network Scan feature is provided to locate applications, services and devices on the network to monitor. After discovery, monitors can be quickly configured using the defaults provided and grouped to define dependencies. Alerts can be quickly configured and tested, then scheduled for the network administration team.

Low Total Cost of Ownership
When comparing monitoring solutions such as ipMonitor that have a relatively low acquisition cost and economical licensing model, the most important consideration becomes the capabilities of the solution. Consider the following points…

With monitoring solutions such as ipMonitor that have a relatively low acquisition cost and economical licensing model, possibly the most important consideration becomes the capabilities of the solution. Please take a moment to consider the following points…

Secure network monitoring - Organizations have become increasingly concerned with security of their networks now that cyber attacks and security breaches are an ongoing obstacle businesses must contend with. ipMonitor Corporation takes security concerns seriously, and is the first network monitoring company to deliver a product in the thousand-dollar price range that addresses the need for secure network management.

Quality assurance monitoring - Most vendors sell quality assurance at a premium by packaging application monitors in the form of add-ons or agents. In contrast, ipMonitor includes Quality Assurance monitors that let you easily monitor applications such as Microsoft® SQL Server, Microsoft® Exchange Server, and web applications at the transaction layer rather than a simple protocol ‘handshake’.

Corrective action - No matter how effective a network monitoring solution is at pinpointing problems, it’s equally as important to be able to take corrective action. In keeping with ipMonitor’s toolkit approach to monitoring, functions are built into the software to launch maintenance and recovery applications, restart Windows® Services and reboot servers. Higher priced competing vendors typically package corrective capabilities on a per application basis and charge extra for each plug-in or agent.

In these times of shrinking budgets, with IT people expected to do more with less, total cost of ownership has become an important consideration when choosing a network monitoring solution. We do not believe you will find another solution that offers the same level of reliability, security, application quality monitoring, recovery options, price point and economical licensing as offered with the ipMonitor 7 network monitoring software.

END-TO-END NETWORK MONITORING

Proactively monitor availability and performance quality for applications, databases, web & ecommerce, mail, servers and infrastructure equipment

The ipMonitor® network monitoring software is an essential monitoring, alerting, recovery, and reporting solution used to proactively monitor mission critical applications, systems and infrastructure equipment.

Toolkit Approach to Network Monitoring
ipMonitor takes a low-level toolkit approach to network monitoring. Its advanced suite of configurable protocol and application level Monitors are flexible and adaptable enough to monitor virtually any resource such as applications, databases, infrastructure equipment, and web, ecommerce and mail servers.

Quality Assurance Monitors perform in-depth quality testing for critical applications such as SQL servers, commerce solutions and dynamic web applications; SNMP polling and traps provide industry standard methods to monitor devices such as routers, switches and load balancers; Operating System specific Monitors are provided for Windows® NT/2000/XP/2003; IP Monitors are provided for popular Internet and Intranet protocols; even redundancy monitoring is possible using a second ipMonitor installation.

Quality Assurance Monitoring
Because downtime is not an option for organizations that must depend on their networks, IT teams need to anticipate problems before they happen and respond quickly when they do. This is a near impossibility without a sophisticated monitoring, alerting and recovery solution.

Take for example, when critical network services or devices fail without providing any outward indication. The application or device might appear to be going through the paces – ping it and it responds – yet internally it has failed for any number of reasons and can no longer perform its expected functions. Worse yet, if the problem occurs over a holiday or weekend period you could be out of commission for hours – even days – before the problem is discovered.

At best, this type of scenario is difficult to detect – possibly the application is caught in a loop it can’t break out of, while basic communications threads continue to function correctly in the background – or possibly a Web Application can no longer access the SQL database it relies on to generate dynamic content so now it returns empty pages – no matter what the cause, most often IT hears about it from someone in the organization or worse yet, a customer.

ipMonitor’s suite of Quality Assurance monitors perform multiple transaction tests to measure response time and analyze results for critical applications and infrastructure equipment. These low-level quality-monitoring tools can be used to monitor all the common server applications most organizations use, such as SQL servers, mail servers, commerce solutions and dynamic web applications, as well as SNMP enabled equipment. For example…

Windows® NT/2000/XP/2003 Systems Monitors

ipMonitor supports eight powerful Microsoft Windows specific and system level monitors to check the status of services and operational parameters on remote computers. Windows monitors are designed specifically to monitor the functionality of key aspects of Microsoft Windows operating systems, from Services to Event logs. For example…

Availability Monitors
ipMonitor supports all popular application-layer protocols that are based on the IP protocol – PING, SNMP, HTTPS, HTML/ASP, SMTP, DNS over UDP, DNS over TCP, Lotus Notes™, Network Speed, HTTP, FTP, POP3, IMAP4, LDAP, NTP, RADIUS, NNTP, Telnet or Simple TCP Port Availability, IRC, Gopher, Finger, WHOIS, RWHOIS, and SNPP.

These monitors are ideal for testing availability and responsiveness of applications, Windows® Services, and network infrastructure & services. For example…

Groups & Dependencies
ipMonitor is most often configured using different "Groups" of monitors that work together to perform a monitoring task. For example consider a website; you might want to monitor the HTTP server, content servers, DNS servers, disk space, NT event logs, RAID drives, router, switches, load balancer, etc. and you might want to PING your upstream provider to make sure their routers are up.

Every Monitor in the equation affects your ability to serve web pages to your customers, so it would make sense that a single Group be used to manage these many monitors and that an Alert be triggered if any single threshold is exceeded or an error condition is met.

It would also be practical to assign "Dependencies" to your website group. For example, if a core switch or router failed, rather than receiving Alerts for every Monitor in the Group you would only receive an Alert for the Dependency, making it much quicker to zero in on the root cause of the trouble – or – you might assign a dependency to a PING monitor that monitors the availability of a server computer, as there would be no reason to receive Alerts for applications installed on the server computer if in fact the server computer is the root problem.

Network Scan
ipMonitor provides the option to perform a Network Scan, which assembles an inventory of services and devices that may be monitored, making it possible to quickly add a large number of individual Monitors to your ipMonitor configuration.

Options to control discovery methods are, DNS, ICMP/PING, SNMP, and TCP & UDP Port Scanning. Once the network has been scanned, a list is assembled that is grouped by IP address or domain name. Suggested Monitors are listed based on the resources that are discovered. Entire Groups of Monitors can be moved into your ipMonitor configuration or Monitors can be selected individually from within various Groups and moved.

Because the Network Scan may take some time if many devices are involved or large networks are specified, scan results are cached on the ipMonitor host server. This allows you to return to the last scan results, without the need to rediscover the network.

Credentials Manager
ipMonitor includes an internal Credentials Manager that is used with Monitors that require access to Windows® file system objects or Services.

When the Credentials Manager is used, the ipMonitor Service is configured to run under a designated NT account with the least amount of privileges ipMonitor requires. The Credentials Manager is then used to impersonate NT accounts with elevated permissions when required by Monitors that need elevated permissions to access file system objects or Services.

Within its internal Credentials data hive ipMonitor uses RSA 512/1024 bit encryption to store sensitive NT account information and configuration parameters.

Authentication for Monitors
Where possible ipMonitor uses authentication methods such as NTLM authentication with IMAP4, POP3, & HTTP, and digest authentication with HTTP. This eliminates the exchange of credentials in clear text.

Scheduled Maintenance
ipMonitor includes the ability to create Maintenance Schedules and apply them to Groups and or Monitors, for example during times when data is backed up or when server restart actions are carried out. During scheduled maintenance periods monitoring is suspended to avoid unnecessary Alerts from being triggered. Maintenance Schedules permit Monitors to be disabled while ipMonitor performs routine actions, or to disable Monitors while actions outside of ipMonitor take place.

Low Total Cost of Ownership
Competing higher priced monitoring solutions tend to sell Quality Assurance at a premium by packaging application monitors in the form of add-ons or agents. Less expensive competitive monitoring solutions typically do not offer quality Assurance Monitoring in any capacity. In contrast, ipMonitor includes Quality Assurance monitors that make it easy to monitor applications such as Microsoft® SQL Server, Microsoft Exchange Server, and web applications at the transaction layer, rather than a simple protocol "handshake".

ipMonitor's toolkit approach to network monitoring further reduces your total cost of ownership. Its highly flexible and adaptable suite of Monitors not only provide a high degree of monitoring flexibility, they also adapt easily to any number of different monitoring requirements across every type of IP enabled network, even large homogenous networks used to build enterprise applications such as, supply chain, CRM, B2B and Web services.

Because ipMonitor does not require agents to be installed across your network, it's quick to deploy and easy to maintain. In most situations it installs in minutes and monitoring begins in hours, rather than days or weeks as with so many more expensive solutions. And, once it’s installed and configured very little ongoing administration effort is required to continue