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Twice a week, noted Network World columnist Dave Kearns brings you Novell NetWare news, notes, facts, figures, brickbats and bouquets.

Dave Kearns

NetCrunch watches heterogeneous networks from a single console

AdRem's NetCrunch heterogeneous network monitoring facility

What are you using to monitor your heterogeneous, NetWare-centric network? Do you need a few minutes to create a list of the products you use? If so, how would you like to be able to monitor the whole network from one console? If that sounds like a good idea, read on.

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Many - I hope most and wish all - of you use AdRem's Free Remote Console (see my thoughts on it at http://www.nwfusion.com/newsletters/netware/2003/0526nw1.html) as a secure replacement for NetWare's Rconsole remote console access tool. It's great, and the price (free) is fantastic, but that's not all AdRem has to offer. The company actually sells products, too. One of those is the recently released NetCrunch Version 3.

<aside> Isn't NetCrunch a neat name? Especially when compared to, for example, "ManageID Enterprise Suite for Microsoft Identity Integration Server 2003, Enterprise Edition," which I wrote about in this week's Windows Networking newsletter. </aside>

NetCrunch is a network monitoring facility that allows you to see and control, from one console, systems running Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, NetWare 3.x, NetWare 4.x, NetWare 5.x, NetWare 6.x, Linux, FreeBSD, HP-UX, Solaris, AIX, and any platform or device supporting SNMP v1 or v2. Did AdRem leave anything out?

Well, what can you do with NetCrunch? Here are a few of its features:

* Automatically discovers and builds an accurate inventory of network devices along with the services running on them.
* Creates dynamic maps of the logical and physical topologies of your network.
* Defines and compiles your own network views that allow you to look at your IT infrastructure by business process, location, host type, vendor, IP address, and several other criteria.
* Accesses consolidated information about the real-time health of critical systems via filters, live charts, tables, graphs and gauges.
* Tracks host and service availability.
* Enables you to be alerted via e-mail, modem, pager, ICQ, SNMP trap, cell phone text message when hosts/services fail or thresholds are violated.
* Automates remote corrective actions such as NT service restart, system reboot, and running of Windows commands, Linux scripts, or Novell NLMs.
* Uses diagnostic tools including graphical traceroute, ping, port/service scanner, bandwidth scanner, and SNMP browser.
* Views live trends to identify utilization patterns and chronic bottlenecks.
* Schedules daily, weekly, or monthly performance reports and have them e-mailed to specified recipients, printed, or exported to multiple formats.

Dave Kearns is a writer and consultant in Silicon Valley. He's written a number of books including the (sadly) now out of print "Peter Norton's Complete Guide to Networks." His musings can be found at Virtual Quill.

Kearns is the author of two Network World Newsletters: Windows Networking Strategies, and Identity Management. Comments about these newsletters should be sent to him at these respective addresses: windows@vquill.com, identity@vquill.com .

Kearns provides content services to network vendors: books, manuals, white papers, lectures and seminars, marketing, technical marketing and support documents. Virtual Quill provides "words to sell by..." Find out more by e-mail.

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