Most network administrators would have at some point drawn a network diagram of their, or a customer's network. This would have impressed the managers and owners at the time. Monitoring and graphing systems may even have been put in place. But most networks develop very quickly and that once nice diagram, probably became out of date before the ink dried. So you end up having to go back and update it all the time, often using a complicated graphical program that did more to frustrate you than help you. Then you ended up having to go back and add alarms and graphs in a separate program for the new devices and services added. If you are like most, at some point things would have started to get neglected as other demands on your time develop. Documentation of the network often also gets neglected or written on pieces of paper and lost. When things start going wrong, the diagrams, alarms and graphs are so out of date they are of little use, and what little documentation there is of the network cannot be found. Net-Probe has been designed to help eliminate these problems. Having one central location where all tasks can be quickly and easily done, with minimal effort and in an organized fashion.
Net-Probe is primarily a graphical network monitor. Graphing and alarming functions make up the backbone of the features, and are built on a network layout diagram. Drawing tools have been kept as simple and productive as possible. Shortcuts to external
programs are easy to integrate, making, for example, that SSH shell only two clicks away. High performance ping, traceroute, network scanning, SNMP browsing and DNS querying have been included. The ability to fix problems as they occur is offered through 'Failure Scripts'.
Network Monitoring Software
Graphs
Alarms
Capable of monitoring any networked device
Flexible
Optional Web Interface (see web-demo)
Task bar components (Band and Alerter)
Feature Packed
Wizard Based
Real Time Monitoring
Net-Probe offers real time monitoring of any network connected device. It does this through a rich graphical interface available through a web browser as well as a dedicated application. Items can be monitored in two ways, either graphed or as an alarm.
Graphical layout
Alarms and graphs are integrated into the graphical layout. Drawing elements have been kept as simple as possible enabling for simple, quick and neat representations of the monitored environment to be setup.
Network layout Detection
Wizards allow for any network to be scanned and a representation of it drawn in a few easy steps. This shows the interconnection of each device.
Alarms
Alarms check a host or service. Below are the methods of acquiring data. You are not limited to these (see expandability below).
SNMP
Performance Monitor
Scripts
CPU Load
DB
DHCP
DiskFreeCheck
DiskFree
DNS
Finger
FTP
HTTP
HTTPS
IMAP
IPChains
IPTables
LDAP
MailQueue-Postfix
MailQueue-Sendmail
MySQL
NNTP
Ping
POP3
PostgreSQL
Process
ProcessCount
Proxy
RADIUS
Service
SMTP
Users
Actions
Actions are performed when an alarm goes off. These could be notification type alerts, either graphical or sound. They could also be functions like sending an email, restarting a service etc.
Alerter
The Alerter is a small application that lives in your task bar and will inform you of the status of the items being monitored.
Graphs
Real time graphs can be included in the layout. The graphs are highly customizable. Like most systems in Net-Probe wizards guide you through the creation process.
Band
One graph can be selected to sit in the task bar.
Network Tools
A number of tools have been included. These include ping, traceroute, snmp browser, dns and a network scanner.
Expandability
One of the methods of getting data for the alarms and graphs are scripts. Dozens of prewritten scripts have been included to measure and test most standard networked services. The source of these is open allowing you to expand or specialize them to other tasks. This makes it possible to monitor any network device. Scripts can also be added to perform specialized actions when an alarm goes off.
Integration
Shortcuts to external applications can be created. This includes the ability to specify command line arguments that, depending on the application, may permit special handling for the device.
