Features

System Health Monitoring

While event log monitoring can relay certain alerts from the operating system, it is unfortunately insufficient for accurately monitoring and tracking a computers health. EventSentry’s system monitoring fills this gap, by natively monitoring all core components of the operating system. System Health Monitoring not only raises alerts for immediate problems, but also collects historical information for later analysis, trend prediction and real-time overview.

Service Monitoring & Controlling

Monitors services and/or drivers, and notifies you when their status changes or when services/drivers are added or removed. Service controlling ensures that selected services are always in a requested state (running, stopped).

Compliance Info: EventSentry’s service monitoring helps with PCI requirement 6.4.

Continuous alerts generate alerts until a service is running again. Service monitoring can also keep a log of all service changes in the database.

More details on service monitoring

Disk & Directory Monitoring & History Collection

Issues alerts when the available disk space or directory usage is below a certain minimum (absolute or percentage) and detect changes in disk trend usage. You can also collect disk space information in a database and view comprehensive charts (includes disk space charts, disk reports and directory reports) through the web reports. Directory monitoring also monitors selected directories, and collects directory statistics in the monitoring database.

More details on disk space monitoring

Performance Monitoring

Performance monitoring lets you monitor your servers’ system and application performance to detect immediate performance issues and analyze performance trends over time.

You can monitor any performance counter available on the monitored system and either be alerted when a counter exceeds a preset threshold or log counter data in the EventSentry database.

More details on performance monitoring

Process Monitoring

Monitors processes to make sure one or more specified processes are running at all times. EventSentry can also monitor the memory consumption of processes to detect memory leaks of processes.

File Change & Checksum Monitoring

File Monitoring allows you to be notified and track changes to critical system and user files. File monitoring detects when files are added, deleted or changed (SHA checksums are also supported).

Compliance Info: EventSentry’s file integrity monitoring helps with PCI requirement 11.5.

For every directory you monitor, you can specify which types of changes you are interested in. When a change occurs, you can either have an event logged to the event log (and subsequently receive an alert) and/or log the change to the EventSentry database.

More details on file monitoring

Monitor in-house applications with built-in custom scripts

The application scheduler allows you to extend EventSentry’s functionality, by integrating your own applications and/or scripts (e.g. batch files, Powershell, VBScripts, Perl Scripts) into EventSentry. Scripts can be embedded into the EventSentry configuration, integrating the deployment of scripts into EventSentry’s update process. Your scripts can be scheduled to run at fixed intervals or specific times. Output from command-line scripts can be captured by EventSentry and sent directly to a notification, such as email. This makes troubleshooting failed scripts easy, since any debug output is immediately captured and available to the reviewer.

Software & Hardware Inventory

EventSentry can monitor all installed software, including patches & updates, and collect all information in the database. This provides the user with a software inventory, that can be used for licensing purposes, patch management/verification and more. (Un)Installed software is detected in near real-time, and alerts can also be generated when software is installed.

Software monitoring can also monitor specific registry keys and file system locations (e.g. HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run) and notify you when an application registers itself for automatic startup. This feature can help detect spyware and adware and help preserve system resources when unneeded applications register themselves to be launched automatically.

EventSentry also captures basic hardware information, including OS Version, OS features as well as hardware (installed memory, NICs, disk controllers) and more.

More details on software & hardware inventory

Uptime Monitoring

Uptime Monitoring logs the current uptime of a monitored host to the database in a specified time interval. This feature primarily reports the current uptime, but also keeps a history of all recorded uptimes across multiple reboots, which can help isolate problematic servers that are rebooted often. Uptime Monitoring also records the longest uptime ever recorded on any given host.

Event Log Backup & Clearing

You can use EventSentry to backup and optionally clear event logs at preset intervals. You determine when to backup which event log and whether the event log should be cleared as well. You can also clear event logs without backing them up.

Compliance Info: Automated event log backups help with PCI requirements 10.2, 10.3 and 10.5.

You can also configure EventSentry to automatically compress event log backup files (.evt and .evtx) in ZIP format to conserve disk space.

NTP Time Synchronization

EventSentry can both verify and synchronize the local time with a RFC 1769 and RFC 1305 NTP server (up to version 3), either in addition to an existing time synchronization (e.g. Active Directory) or as the sole mechanism to synchronize time on all monitored servers and workstations.

Compliance Info: EventSentry’s NTP monitoring helps with PCI requirement 10.4.

When the time between a monitored host and the NTP server is out of sync, then EventSentry will attempt to synchronize the time (if configured) and can also log a message to the event log, reporting the detected time difference.

More details on NTP monitoring

Dashboard

The EventSentry Dashboard shows you the overall health status of one or more servers at a glance with easy to read gauges. The dashboard is also available as a widget that can be placed on your desktop. The dashboard shows you the following information:

• CPU + Memory Utilization
• Average Disk Queue Length
• Current Disk Space Usage
• Heartbeat Status
• General System Information