AdRem upgrades NetCrunch

It's been almost 2 years since I last mentioned AdRem's NetCrunch (see "NetCrunch watches heterogeneous networks from a single console") but the longtime NetWare utility supplier has just shipped a new release (NetCrunch Version 4) and it's something you should be aware of.

Not only is it a very good network-monitoring package but it also is optimized for NetWare. AdRem describes the application as a tool to discover and visualize TCP/IP networks in order to monitor, alert and report on performance of network servers, devices, services and applications. In other words, it keeps its eye on your network - and everything running on it - 24/7, so you don't have to. The program controls systems running Windows NT/2000/XP, Windows Server 2003, NetWare 3.x and higher, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, AIX, or any other platform or device supporting SNMPv1, v2 or v3. OK, you say, it supports SNMP traps. Ho-hum. But - as they say - wait, there's more.

NetCrunch can retrieve and graph statistics about Novell NetWare servers via performance counters available in NetWare 3.x to 6.x and Novell OES (NetWare kernel) systems. This way, you can keep tabs on vital operational parameters of the NetWare server such as processor and memory utilization, disk space usage, NLM usage, connections, and files and many others. But in addition to monitoring, all the SNMP-aware NetWare servers discovered in your network can also be controlled using NetCrunch's SNMP management capabilities.

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It's been almost 2 years since I last mentioned AdRem's NetCrunch (see "NetCrunch watches heterogeneous networks from a single console") but the longtime NetWare utility supplier has just shipped a new release (NetCrunch Version 4) and it's something you should be aware of.

Not only is it a very good network-monitoring package but it also is optimized for NetWare. AdRem describes the application as a tool to discover and visualize TCP/IP networks in order to monitor, alert and report on performance of network servers, devices, services and applications. In other words, it keeps its eye on your network - and everything running on it - 24/7, so you don't have to. The program controls systems running Windows NT/2000/XP, Windows Server 2003, NetWare 3.x and higher, Linux, Solaris, FreeBSD, AIX, or any other platform or device supporting SNMPv1, v2 or v3. OK, you say, it supports SNMP traps. Ho-hum. But - as they say - wait, there's more.

NetCrunch can retrieve and graph statistics about Novell NetWare servers via performance counters available in NetWare 3.x to 6.x and Novell OES (NetWare kernel) systems. This way, you can keep tabs on vital operational parameters of the NetWare server such as processor and memory utilization, disk space usage, NLM usage, connections, and files and many others. But in addition to monitoring, all the SNMP-aware NetWare servers discovered in your network can also be controlled using NetCrunch's SNMP management capabilities.

NetCrunch can track and alert on issues affecting mission-critical server subsystems and components, such as:

* CPU, memory, disk
* Print jobs and queues
* Statistics and performance counters
* Processes, jobs and NLMs
* Directory and file system
* Network utilization

In addition to monitoring and alerting, though, you can set up a proactive threshold conditions on each monitored NetWare counter, which can trigger remedial actions as well as notifications. For example, you can configure NetCrunch to unload an NLM or down/restart a NetWare server in response to a specific event. NetCrunch allows you to set up a wide range of NetWare-related events, some of which are preconfigured in the program including:

* Long term cache hits less than 90%
* Number of cache buffers less than 1,000
* Server memory available less than 10%
* Server utilization greater than 90%

You can click here and get all the gory details as well as download an eval version of NetCrunch 4. It's a good tool and, maybe most important, it's a good NetWare-aware tool.

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