Article: IPHost Network Monitor Review

IPHost Network Monitor keeps an eye on various types of network devices, servers, workstations and informs you about failures and possible problems. Some issues can be automatically resolved by the program itself, as it is capable of starting scripts and applications specified by you (both locally and remotely), if it detects certain events. This may greatly increase the overall efficiency of your network and servers, eliminate costly downtimes, detect what software and hardware needs to be upgraded and how the upgrades improve the performance.

IPHost Network Monitor can help you to reduce costs of network and server maintenance in several ways:

• Detect problems at early stages, don't let them develop into something serious.
• Minimize downtimes. The program will alert the administrator immediately, if there is something wrong with the monitored objects. IPHost Network Monitor can send emails, SMS (either over the network or using a GSM modem), ICQ, AOL IM, Jabber instant messages, play sound and display a popup message. Besides, certain problems can be fixed automatically by running an application or a script (locally or remotely) or setting SNMP variable value.
• Determine which software and hardware needs to be upgraded in order to improve performance. There is not much sense in purchasing expensive hardware, if an existing bottleneck will not allow using it effectively. On the other hand, removing an existing bottleneck may be easy and inexpensive, if you know where to look.

Being a tool for network and server specialists, IPHost Network Monitor shows that professional software doesn't have to be incomprehensible. Easy to install and set up, the program allows you to start monitoring your network in just a couple of minutes. The interface is clean and pretty intuitive, monitored objects can be easily sorted, main features and tools are represented as big toolbar buttons and thus are obvious. With IPHost Network Monitor one is able to start "learning by doing": instead of reading tutorials you can simply use the program and discover what it does.

IPHost Network Monitor supports quite a number of monitoring methods, including SNMP and WMI (CPU load, available memory, incoming and outgoing traffic, custom WMI scripts and SNMP OIDs); monitoring of websites and services; mail; file size; disc space; availability of windows services; monitoring of database servers (native support for MySQL and Oracle); web transaction monitor for checking e-commerce services etc.

Websites and web applications monitoring is a strong point of IPHost Network Monitor. Web page monitor is rather good with response content validation, SSL and user authentication support. For monitoring web applications and e-commerce websites add-on tool is provided - web transaction monitor. This tool can record and monitor multi-step website usage scenarious like filling forms to create a new account, checkout process, login/logout, browsing a product catalog and so on.

The program doesn't require any agents to be installed on the devices that it monitors, but if you need to control devices in several different networks from a single computer, the Remote Network Agent add-on is available for the purpose. It is also possible to access reports remotely using a web browser.

IPHost Network Monitor is a good solution for businesses of any size, from small companies that own a single server and depend on its performance to large corporations with multiple networks and numerous devices (servers, workstations). The program can help you to keep your network healthy and to eliminate network problems quickly by providing information about failures in good time or by solving problems without any help from human users.