Zen Software Intellipool Network Monitor 2.1 review

Network-monitoring software can be an invaluable aid for administrators, as it provides a wide range of essential tools for checking network health but at a fraction of the cost of hardware solutions. Last year, we cast our gaze over ten such products and concluded that, with a few exceptions, the majority offered a fine range of features at an affordable price. Better known for its MDaemon mail server product, Zen Software has now moved into network monitoring with a package developed in Sweden by Intellipool that also looks good value.

Intellipool Network Monitor (INM) is designed to monitor just about any type of device on your network and this includes server and workstation resources, such as disk space and memory usage. Each managed device is classed as an object, and INM uses different agents to keep an eye on the various functions. At present, INM comes with 37 different agents ranging from a simple ping agent, which checks at regular intervals that an object is active, to checking specific SNMP OID values, while others keep an eye on web, mail and FTP services through to CPU loads and Windows performance. You can also measure temperatures of remote systems, but INM doesn't interact with existing motherboard sensors and requires a TempTrax digital thermometer installed, with the RS-232 serial port version costing about £80 per unit. Also, note that INM won't be able to tell you about general network utilisation or identify stations consuming the most bandwidth - for these features, check out ObjectPlanet's Network Probe (www.objectplanet.com) if you want them at a giveaway price.

Installation of INM only takes a few minutes, and a key selling point is that no extra software needs to be installed on each object for it to be monitored. Being a web service means it can be accessed from anywhere on the intranet or Internet using a standard browser. After creating a network and entering an IP address range, you can let INM loose on it to scan for devices, which it uses to populate the tree as objects. Most will automatically be assigned the ping agent, but it's simple enough to add more agents for each object. A critical requirement of many agents is that INM has sufficient logon rights to access the remote system's data. The SNMP agent is probably the least impressive. We found setting this up for a managed ten-port Gigabit switch to be very tricky. Each port required a separate agent instance and the information forthcoming was of limited value, making it difficult to see how we could monitor traffic levels for a particular port.

Actions are used to determine INM's behaviour when an agent sends an alarm, and there's a long list to choose from. Warning messages can be sent via email, pager, SMS or network broadcast, and you can pause, stop and restart services or send WoL (Wake on LAN) packets. Notification and alerting features are well thought out. You create operators, place them in groups and assign these to objects, making it easy to ensure the right people are notified when a particular system goes down. You can also create dependencies, which organise selected agents into lists causing them to carry out actions in a specific order should a device fail.

Author: Dave Mitchell