OmniMonitor N/w Monitoring Service

OmniMonitor is an agentless monitoring appliance which can monitor IT

infrastructure such as servers, network devices, operating systems and

applications as well as application components. Interestingly Omnitech, its

vendor, doesn't sell this appliance. They provide it as a solution and charge

customers on a monthly basis. OmniMonitor uses agentless architecture i.e. you

don't have to go and install agents on your production systems. It achieves

the monitoring task by logging into different systems as a user or through

standard protocols. The appliance itself is like a small PC at its core, running

Windows Server 2003 and Mercury's SiteScope as its monitoring software.

Incidentally SiteScope is also a commercial product that can be purchased

separately but if you don't want to go through the hassle of configuring and

implementing it then OmniMonitor is a good choice.

Price: Upto Rs 50,000 per month for 100 points Meant For: Enterprises Key Specs: Server, network, database monitoring, instant alerts through e-mail and SMS Pros: Agentless monitoring, offered as a service, so you don't have to worry about configuration and implementation. Cons: None Contact: Omnitech Infosolutions, Mumbai Tel: 40956666 E-mail: amit.a@omnitechinda.com  RQS# E62 or SMS Buy 131162 to 6677

To understand the OmniMonitor service model, let's take a typical situation

where a single server needs to be monitored for about 5 parameters like CPU

utilization, disk space, memory utilization, etc. Here, one parameter is like

one point. According to Omnitech, about 20 servers can be monitored under 100

points but, it really depends on how many parameters you choose for monitoring.

If you exceed more than 100 points, you'll have to shell out Rs. 30,000 per

month for every additional 100 points.

OmniMonitor's configuration, status and reports can be seen through a web

browser. It can also send screenshots of reports through email. OmniMonitor also

provides real time alerts through e-mail, SMS and sound. For SMS alerts, the

company provides you a special cellphone. Unfortunately we got only the

appliance for review, so we couldn't check out this feature.

The device also provides mail monitoring services which include Mail Traffic

Monitoring, MAPI Services Monitoring for MS Exchange etc. Its Mail Monitor

checks the Mail Server and verifies if the mail server is accepting requests or

not and also verifies that a message can be sent and retrieved. For web servers

it provides FTP Access Monitoring, URL content Monitoring, web server

availability (URL and link check), performance and load statistics. It also

provides Citrix and SAP server availability and performance monitoring. For

Windows it provides performance monitoring, Lightweight Directory Monitoring,

proactive fault management etc.

Coming to Network monitoring, it can monitor SNMP-enabled network appliances

such as routers and switches for bandwidth as well as performance parameters. It

also provides SNMP framework based Reporting where SNMP Trap Monitor watches for

SNMP Traps, and as and when received, it reports the network problems instantly.

In our tests the product gave a good performance. Once implemented it monitored

the devices continuously and it was able to raise alerts as soon as the server

exceeded from the threshold levels we set up.

Bottom Line: Overall OmniMonitor is a useful service to help you

reduce network downtime. But its price is something you would want to evaluate.

Swapnil Arora