Today's computer system and system monitoring technologies can be very proactive in nature and even warn of potential problems in advance so corrective action can be taken.

The functions of a network monitor have changed over time. At one point, a network monitor was limited to watching a company's communication interfaces and receiving notification if they were down. Today, a network monitor can be much broader in scope and involve the proactive performance measurement of computer hardware and communication pipelines to ensure they operate within a specified range.

Macrolevel's host and service monitoring service was designed to inform you of network problems. The independant monitoring daemon runs on our server intermittent checks on hosts and services our technical team specified especially for your computer system(s) and devices. When problems are encountered, our technicialns will receive immediate notification about the problem occured and will inform you and/or services provider. It is most important when the problem occur in non-working hours and need be resolved before time when the office opens. Current status information, historical logs, and reports can all be accessed via a web browser.

Features

• Monitoring of network services (SMTP, POP3, HTTP, NNTP, PING, etc.)
• Monitoring of host resources (processor load, disk and memory usage, running processes, log files, etc.)
• Monitoring of servers running Windows, Linux, UNIX, Novell
• Monitoring of environmental factors such as temperature (additional equipment required).
• Ability to define network host hierarchy, allowing detection of and distinction between hosts that are down and those that are unreachable
• Contact notifications when service or host problems occur and get resolved (via email, pager, or other user-defined method)
• Support for implementing redundant and distributed monitoring servers
• Scheduled downtime for suppressing host and service notifications during periods of planned outages
• Ability to acknowledge problems via the web interface
• Web interface for viewing current network status, notification and problem history, log file, etc.

A network monitor is well worth the investment and is something you should ask your hosting company to provide.

Basic Monitoring -- Ping, Port & URL

The most basic level of monitoring tells if something is available or not. Ping monitoring says if an IP address is alive, port monitoring says if a specific port at an IP address is reachable, and URL monitoring says if a specific web site page is alive. These do not measure performance, but can tell if something needs to be fixed. Basic monitoring provides no advance warning, so the corrective actions they initiate will be reactive in nature.

In its most basic form a network monitor sends a notification that something is no longer working or is not available. This would include ping, port, URL and most web site monitoring. The notification is reactive in nature and allows you to know that something needs to be fixed. The use of this network monitor should be limited to companies and home users that can afford to have their computer system down while repairs are made.

Advanced Network Monitor

For companies that want to avoid system or network outages, the network monitor needs to be much more proactive. A proactive network monitor would involve taking performance measurements of such things as CPU usage, server load, disk utilization, and memory usage. It might include the SNMP polling of every piece of equipment on the company's LAN or WAN. A network monitor could even measure the response time of transactions and applications that are critical to the company or its bandwidth utilization. If any of these measurements were outside of preset boundaries the network monitor would send an alert so corrective action could be taken before the situation became critical. All the performance measurements taken by this network monitor also are stored in a database for trend analysis and capacity planning.

• Server Performance Monitoring
  This is the next level of monitoring and where the majority of monitoring services end. The methodology to perform this monitoring depends on the operating system on the server. The items being monitored would include such things as CPU usage, server load, disk utilization, memory usage, and data about the log files. This monitoring can provide advance warning about upcoming system problems if the thresholds for the alerts are set properly. For example, if the upper alert level for disk usage is set at 85% or 90% you would be able to take action prior to the disk becoming full.
• Custom Performance Monitoring
  Almost every piece of equipment on a company's LAN or WAN can be monitored via SNMP polling. The problem is that few monitoring companies are willing learn a specific device's management information base so they can create the correct SNMP call. If your computer system and network is truly mission critical this extra level of monitoring can make all the difference. You will either need to commit the internal resources or find a monitoring company that will develop custom SNMP calls.
• Transaction & Application Monitoring
  Many monitoring packages can tell you if an application is alive or dead, but few companies monitor the response time of transactions or applications. This can make a huge difference as an application can be alive but so slow that no customer or employee can use it. For example, this type of monitoring could be used to ensure the response time of shopping cart transactions for ecommerce companies or how fast server based applications responded to employees.
• Bandwidth Monitoring
  The high cost of telecom pipelines makes bandwidth monitoring a necessity. It provides a way to optimize the size of your telecom pipelines, identify bottlenecks, capacity plan, verify bills, and eliminate illegal usage.

Interested in? Need more information? Contact us!