More low-cost network management

By Mark Gibbs
Network World, 05/20/02

A few weeks ago we reviewed Ipswitch's WhatsUp Gold and in response, reader Kevin Stone wrote, "I can't disagree with your evaluation of WhatsUp Gold, but gave up on the product a few years back after discovering Servers Alive. It's about 1/7th the price of WUG and offers almost the same feature set. The most noticeable difference is the lack of a device map."

"Hummm," we said, and set to testing Woodstone's Servers Alive. We found it to be a really interesting product and, at only $90, a terrific value for the money.

You can download an evaluation version of Servers Alive that monitors up to 10 devices free. Installation can be done on Windows 2000 (Professional or Server), NT (Workstation or Server), ME, 98 or 95 - only Windows XP is not supported. Under NT and Win 2000, Servers Alive can run as a service.

The user interface is simple consisting of a list of monitored servers and the last status of each. Buttons below the list window let you add, edit and delete devices, and set up global options or exit.

Setup includes specifying notification details for audio, WAP, SMTP (primary and alternate servers can be defined) and pagers, and display and start-up options (the latter include a monitoring start delay so that when Servers Alive is run as a service it waits until the server is completely initialized). Syslog support also is available.

Other setup parameters include HTML report generation, which can be automatically written to a subdirectory and optionally FTP'ed to a server. Any number of pages can be created including "pretty" pages for managers and technical pages for techies.

Here's where Servers Alive becomes less friendly: If you want to authenticate to the target FTP server you'll need to edit a number of registry entries.

You can get fancy with the look and feel of the pages generated by editing more registry entries or by using the template option - Servers Alive supports a large number of variables that are substituted on the fly when the pages are generated. Unfortunately, no sample templates are included.

Servers Alive also includes a built-in Web server that delivers simple reports, but it has no security so you would probably only want to use that feature in-house. There's also a built-in telnet server that lets you get a text-only status display and control the operation of Servers Alive.

Adding a device consists of specifying the name, IP address or IPX address of the target; designating a "pretty" name for the device; a numeric identification for use in numeric paging and for interchange data output (Servers Alive supports automatic generation of a CSV status file) and, finally, what type of check should be made.

Checks can be pings, specific TCP and UDP port tests, external tests that you write (Servers Alive evaluates the return code of the external application as the device status), NT services, free disk space, URLs, database server queries, several NetWare server parameters and SNMP responses. You must specify a new device entry for each separate check you want to perform.

When and how checks should be made can be specified for each device entry by days of the week and by priority. You also can specify what kind of notification should be raised: sound, e-mail, pager, running an external command or making a syslog entry.

Device dependencies are also supported. This means that devices such as routers aren't polled unless a device that depends on them stops responding; this reduces the polling load and the network traffic.

For the price and range of features offered it is hard to fault Servers Alive. On the other hand, we'd like to see example HTML templates, setting of the large number of registry entries from within Servers Alive, automatic device discovery and some kind of graphical map.

Our conclusion is that while we generally agree with Mr. Stone, we feel WhatsUp Gold is a more comprehensive product and more suited for larger-scale management strategies than Servers Alive. That said, Servers Alive could easily acquire all those features.

We award Servers Alive nine gearteeth out of ten! A great product and great value.

Management recommendations to gearhead@gibbs.com.