Features

Network Monitoring

Network Services

Network Services service includes both the Syslog and SNMP daemon, enabling immediate alerts from critical messages as well as the consolidation of Syslog and SNMP traps in a central, searchable database.

The service will cache received syslog and/or snmp traps if the central database is temporarily unavailable. Both Syslog and SNMP traps can be configured to only accept packages from certain IP addresses or networks, and you can restrict the number of packets the service accepts over a given time period.

Syslog Daemon

You can collect and consolidate syslog data from any device that supports the syslog protocol. EventSentry’s syslog daemon (UDP and TCP are both supported) can be configured to consolidate incoming Syslog messages to the central database and/or log incoming Syslog messages to the Windows Application event log. The Syslog daemon can be configured to accept/reject messages based on their content, facility, severity or origin.

Using the web-based reporting, you can search across all collected syslog data from your entire network.

The syslog protocol is supported by various Unix/Linux flavors (e.g. Linux©, RedHat©, SUSE©, OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, Sun© Solaris©, Apple© OSX 10.x, various Cisco and other high-end network devices).

SNMP Trap Daemon

The SNMP trap daemon, part of the network services, logs incoming SNMP traps (v1, v2c and v3 are supported) to the event log and/or consolidates the traps in the central EventSentry database. SNMP traps can be accepted/rejected based on a contained OID or content (payload).

The SNMP trap daemon is easy to configure, and supports both privacy and authentication. For an easy setup, SNMP v3 users can be configured for a single engine ID or multiple engine IDs.

Heartbeat Monitoring

With heartbeat monitoring you can monitor the uptime of hosts, TCP-based network services and the EventSentry agent. The Heartbeat agent can monitor any ip based host, including Windows servers, workstations, Unix/Linux hosts, network switches, routers and more.

In a nutshell, you can monitor:

• hosts through ICMP (ping) packets
• network services through TCP connections
• EventSentry agents running on your Windows servers and workstations

Notification Methods

Since all heartbeat notifications go through the event log, you can take full advantage of EventSentry’s notification types as well as sophisticated event log processing engine. For example, you can notify different recipients based on the type of host that is down, or time of day.

Status and History Reports

In addition to being notified when a host or service go offline (or back online), EventSentry offers a heartbeat status web page that will show you at a glance which hosts and services are currently online or offline. A heartbeat history page will show you a complete history of all status changes. Both the status and history page are either HTML pages constantly update by the agent, or saved to a database where the status and history reports can be viewed through the web reports, which offers additional search features.

Monitoring through PING

You can monitor remote ip hosts by sending fully-customized ICMP packets. This monitoring type offers the following features:

• Configure the amount and size of the ICMP packets to send to the remote host
• Configure the desired success rate (e.g. 50% of packets should be acknowledged)
• Configure the desired average response (e.g. 500ms)

Monitoring HTTP/HTTPS web pages

EventSentry can monitor any HTTP/HTTPS page for availability with the application scheduler and the free CheckURL utility. Be notified when a page’s checksum changes and ensure that a given content does (or does not) appear on the page.

Monitoring database availability

EventSentry can monitor any database which offers ODBC drivers for availability with the application scheduler and the free CheckDB utility. The utility will connect to the database, authenticate, and optionally run a SQL statement and check its return code.

Monitoring network services through TCP

In addition to or instead of PING monitoring you can verify that remote services listening on TCP ports (e.g. POP3, HTTP, SMTP etc.) are active. You can specify multiple ports when monitoring a host.

Monitoring EventSentry Agents

For computers running Windows and the EventSentry agents, monitoring the EventSentry agents will ensure that your servers and workstations are being monitored. This feature will ensure that the EventSentry service is in a running state on the monitored computers.

Ping Tracking (Traffic Graph)

Ping response times can be recorded in the central database. You can activate this feature either globally or on a per-host basis and view the ping-response chart using the web reports.

Availability

The heartbeat availability page shows you the uptime of all monitored hosts (based on PING) in percent, useful when you need to fulfill service level agreements (SLA) or simply to see which hosts are most reliable. The report includes the total uptime, total downtime, total time monitored and the calculated uptime in percent.

Advanced Features

Heartbeat-Monitoring also has these additional features:

• Hosts in a heartbeat-group can be flagged as a router in order to suppress duplicate heartbeat alerts
• Only check agents or TCP ports when a PING was successful to avoid duplicate notifications
• Immediately repeat a check that failed to avoid receiving notifications on temporary outages
• Require X failed checks to trigger an error in the event log
• Maintenance Schedules allow you to suppress alerts during scheduled maintenance periods

Heartbeat-Only Licensing

We offer special heartbeat-only licenses that are more affordable than the regular EventSentry licenses. Please see pricing for more information.