Raising a red flag

It wasn't long after taking a network management job at Barr Systems that Jerry Leffert realized he had no way of knowing what was up or down on the manufacturing company's network in Gainesville, Fla.

While the network didn't suffer problemsduring the first few months, it was the calm before the storm. Then things began to go wrong.

One day an end user called to report the Primary Domain Controller that processed network authentication was down. Sure enough, there was a problem. Another morning, Leffert arrived at work to find staffers waiting to tell him that the phone server had crashed.

As it was, Leffert and his three colleagues in the IT department were busy enough managing the company's 150-node ATM LAN. He knew his predecessor spent a lot of time manually checking systems, but he didn't have much time to do a daily walk-through. Leffert realized the IT department needed network monitoring and alerting software to stand watch over the network and send immediate alerts when thresholds were triggered or servers stopped responding.

Ease of use and fast, simple installation were important to Leffert because he didn't want to read a manual or go to training. He needed a product that could ping IP devices on the network and monitor event logs and services around the clock with no downtime.

Leffert researched products online and read product reviews to find a network monitoring and alerting package that met his needs. He decided to evaluate, and later purchased, Avtech's PageR Enterprise 1.2.4.

PageR Enterprise met his basic criteria, and mostly, it offered a simple window interface. He downloaded the software, ran the executable and entered the name and IP address of each device he wanted to monitor.

Soon after he completed a temporary license form on Avtech's Web site, a company sales representative contacted Leffert to see how things were going and explain more about the product's features. The sales representative also helped him identify the kind of pager and paging service he used so he could configure it.

Leffert can configure the software to ping the IP address of a switch or router once every minute and receive alerts when the device goes down. He knows he can ignore a one-time device page that may just indicate heavy traffic, but continuous device alerts indicate a real problem to which he can quickly respond. Other product features he appreciates include server health log monitoring and the ability to monitor and restart Windows NT Exchange.

Moreover, Leffert is pleased with PageR Enterprise's Web-based monitoring capabilities. He can remotely access the monitoring software from a Web browser to monitor logs or stop and start itself. This is useful for bringing servers down for service.

In the next week or so, he will install his free upgrade to PageR Enterprise 1.3, which was released earlier this month.

Leffert will be able to start and stop the monitoring and alerting of individual objects like a server, rather than just the entire application. The new release also offers the ability to open multiple windows for monitoring separate items. Pricing for Avtech's PageR Enterprise 1.3 starts at $2,390.

"I have peace of mind knowing I will be alerted if network status changes," Leffert says. If you inherit a network, he says you should make sure it already has a monitoring and alerting system or install one. And if you're just starting to build a network, design a monitoring system in it. "It doesn't matter whether your network runs or not if you don't know whether it runs or not," says Leffert

The need for alerting and monitoring software also became mission critical for Rick Schatzl, intranet operations manager at Millipore, manufacturer in Bedford, Mass. E-mail and Lotus Notes usage began to soar at the company, which operates 24x7 and supports 4,000 users worldwide.

While Millipore's data center is staffed around the clock, the overnight shift doesn't have primary responsibility for monitoring the Notes and e-mail servers. Increasingly, Schatzl was encountering an angry manager when he arrived at work in the morning because the Notes server went down.

So Schatzl decided to investigate network monitoring and alerting software. He was somewhat familiar with Lotus' Notes View, but he heard it might not be supported in the future. Moreover, that product runs over HP OpenView, an application that requires extensive configuration and training.

However, Schatzl's colleague had run across Ipswitch Software's WhatsUp Gold and passed it on to him. Installation in a non-production environment was a snap. He configured the server names and IP addresses and selected pre-defined ports for various devices and services. However, he needed to type in the parameter for the Lotus Notes because the port wasn't pre-defined on the software.

He brought the servers up and down to test the product and was pleased to see that WhatsUp Gold promptly sent alerts. And because the software monitored TCP/IP and HTTP protocols as well as Lotus Notes and SQL, Schatzl decided to buy it. WhatsUp Gold 4.0 costs $695 per server.

Schatzl liked the fact that the software only requires a small amount of disk space and minimal training. He set the schedule and type of alerts for the servers to paging, e-mail, and an audible alert. When a server goes down off-hours for more than one minute, the monitoring console triggers a siren in three data center locations, the onscreen server icon turns red and sends e-mail to the overnight staff.

If the server is still down after 15 minutes, WhatsUp Gold pages Schatzl and three other managers. And if the server is still down after a half-hour, the monitoring and alerting package pages Schatzl's superiors.

Schatzl can typically talk an onsite staffer through the problem. He's pleased the automated process has lessened the burden of responsibility on the after-hours staff. The package has helped Schatzl increase overall server uptime and alerted him to a bandwidth problem on the network, which makes him feel less under the microscope during weekly staff meetings. "We no longer have this monkey on our back," he says.

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