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Dave Bailey, IT Week, Thursday 24 January 2008 at 00:00:00

IpMonitor 9.0 makes it easy for admins to spot anything untoward occurring on the network

Launched today, SolarWinds ipMonitor version 9.0 is a feature-rich package for monitoring network assets, and alerting administrative staff to glitches in applications running over the network and problems with network hardware. For instance, if a switch goes down or high CPU utilisation is detected on a critically important server, ipMonitor will sound the alarm. OS support includes Windows 2000 Professional, Vista, XP, and Windows Servers 2000 and 2003. We installed ipMonitor on an XP Professional system to check a home network comprising a broadband router, switch, a wireless network and a mix of desktop and laptop systems. We also installed ipMonitor on a Windows Server 2003 system in IT Weeks labs, where it monitored two servers, a router, a wireless network, two switches, a printer and several desktop and laptop systems. Simple interface After the install, ipMonitor goes through a first-time configuration wizard, which runs through basic settings including licensing, user accounts, alert and monitor defaults, and port assignment. IpMonitor's web-based management interface has four tabs across the top of the page: dashboard, devices, reports and configuration. Initially users will see the dashboard, designed to give network administrators an overall picture of the state of their network. With a single click users can drill down from the dashboard page to a range of windows showing, for example, all the devices on their network, devices being monitored that have problems, current network operations and the top 10 devices by ping availability. From the dashboard, administrators can choose to either manually scan the network for devices or use ipMonitor's Auto Discovery function. After a scan, the discovered devices are presented and the user can then choose what to monitor. With the manual option, users can choose to scan a specific IP range, a standard Windows Network Neighbourhood, a DNS Zone or systems specified on an imported Hosts File. For the specific IP range scan, we could also specify further subnets if required. IpMonitor works by having the user assign individual monitors to check specific system parameters, such as memory usage. In other words, monitors perform a single dedicated task, which could be checking whether a particular router is up and running, or at what level web server CPU utilisation is. For other server systems, users could choose to deploy a monitor to check system memory usage or disk space remaining. To help users decide what monitors to deploy is the role of ipMonitor's SmartMonitor Recommended Settings feature, which makes recommendations based on...

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