SilverBack InfoCare 3.5

Want to take a long lunch, but you're afraid to take your eyes off the network for more than a few minutes? Consider hiring an "extra pair of eyes" to watch over things. SilverBack Technologies says its InfoCare 3.5 service and appliance can do this without blinking.

InfoCare is a 24-7 subscription-based, network-monitoring service that links your network back to SilverBack's data center. SilverBack installs a rack-mounted network appliance on the network, establishes a secure VPN (using Triple-DES encryption and IP Security) between the appliance and SilverBack's central site and then remotely monitors the network for performance problems and connection outages. Companies can access the InfoCare monitoring features locally via a Web browser.

We tested InfoCare's network discovery, monitoring, reporting and ease of use. We also investigated the monitoring service's capabilities and expertise.

While the remote-monitoring service was impressive and especially appropriate for small or midsize companies wanting to outsource network-monitoring chores, we recommend you keep your existing monitoring tools until SilverBack improves its client-user interface.

At your service

We installed the InfoCare 3.5 Customer Premises Equipment (CPE) on a six-segment Fast Ethernet network (see How we did it). Our tests revealed InfoCare lets you take your eye off the network, albeit with some drawbacks and nontrivial user-interface annoyances. It discovered our network and monitored it for a plethora of potential faults and problems. SilverBack's remote monitoring of customer networks appears to be secure, and is an effective alternative to adequately staffing a full-time, in-house monitoring effort. At its data center in Exodus, Mass., SilverBack has what it calls an InfoNest, or MegaCPE. The MegaCPE runs instances of InfoCare monitoring software that SilverBack's customer support staff use to keep watch over specific customer devices or servers. Typically used to monitor servers, the MegaCPE tracks network connectivity, server CPU utilization, memory utilization, disk utilization, background processes (Windows services) and the server's event logs to detect problems. However, the thresholds that the data center uses are separate from any thresholds the customer sets.

SilverBack uses availability reports to determine which systems are unreachable. Event-log monitoring and Windows security policies are used to detect hacking and intrusion attempts. The MegaCPE notifies SilverBack customer support, via e-mail and paging, when a problem arises in a customer's network. If SilverBack personnel can't resolve the problem, they use e-mail, paging and phone calls to notify the customer.

A VPN failure would cause the customer's SilverBack appliance to dial the data center through a built-in modem. Customer support staff also can dial in to the customer's appliance to check on the health of the network. SilverBack's procedures and policies seem sound - our tests elicited many phone calls and e-mails from SilverBack.