ISPPlanet Network Management System Series - ipMonitor

I'll Be Watching You:
ipMonitor

by Lisa Phifer VP Core Competence, Inc. [July 12, 2000]

It is far better to find and fix troubles proactively than to discover failures after your help desk is flooded with customer calls. But monitoring the health of every device and service in your network through independent methods—trawling through *NIX syslogs and NT event logs, listening for SNMP traps—can be labor-intensive, plagued by information overload. What you really want is a reliable, tech-savvy watchdog who keeps a vigilant eye on your entire network, quietly chasing away easily-fixed problems and barking only when your attention is truly needed.

Here, in the second of our entry-level NMS series, we take a look at MediaHouse ipMonitor v6. ipMonitor is a relatively inexpensive ($695) watchdog that runs on Windows NT4 SP5 or Windows 2000. ipMonitor can monitor small ISP networks and midsize ISP POPs for device or service failures, with automated alerting, recovery, and reports that detail actual and projected service levels.

ipMonitor v6.02 $695 MediaHouse Software, Inc. Hull, Quebec, J8Y 1V4, Canada http://www.mediahouse.com

Getting Started With ipMonitor
If you have a PC that runs NT, it can probably support ipMonitor. At minimum, you'll need a Pentium II 233 with 8 MB of disk space. Naturally, the more resources you monitor and the longer you keep historical data (maximum one year), the greater your requirements will be. We evaluated ipMonitor on a P500 and easily ran about 200 five minute interval monitors spanning resources in three subnetworks.

When ipMonitor is first installed, a seven-step dialog prompts for basic information: disk location, serial number, IP address and port for ipMonitor's browser-based GUI, and at least one admin account/password for GUI access. The installer also determines which features can be accessed though the GUI without a password (by default, status and logging only). When done, the installer launches the ipMonitor service and a "Getting Started" guide (right) that offers a solid introduction to ipMonitor concepts.

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The only less-than-intuitive part of installation concerns use of ipMonitor to control NT services (left). By default, ipMonitor is able to control local NT services. But ipMonitor can also monitor, start, and stop remote NT services when configured to run under an account with suitable permissions on all systems. For security, controls can be constrained to requests from selected IP addresses. We misconfigured these parameters at first, causing bogus SERVICE failures and broken links in the GUI. But these problems were easily remedied once we understood the implications of these parameters. If you plan to monitor remote NT services, specify a non-default account during installation, and include your own loopback address if you restrict NT control.

The ipMonitor GUI can be launched from the Start Menu or any browser. This cleanly-designed, forms-based interface is convenient for remote status monitoring. Rudimentary access control is provided by password authentication and limiting local IP address(es) on which the GUI runs. But we'd rather constrain remote IP addresses for all GUI access (not just NT control) and use SSL to protect management traffic from prying eyes. For these reasons, security-conscious ISPs may prefer to limit the GUI to local (loopback IP) access.

Initial Configuration

When you first run ipMonitor, a "ToDo List" (see, right) enumerates configuration tasks. As you visit each configuration page, a task is crossed off the list. We found this unique approach helpful and non-intrusive. Configurations can be exported/imported for simple backup/restore.

The first order of business is to configure Site Settings (left): these include addresses for outgoing email and ICQ notifications, an alternate DNS address, SNMP community string (default public), the IP address used to listen for SNMP traps (default none), and various GUI tuning parameters. Based on this, you might guess that ipMonitor is based on SNMP—but you'd be wrong. SNMP is just one of 25 Internet protocols used by ipMonitor, and forms the basis for just a handful the 40+ built-in monitor types.