ISPPlanet NMS Series - MG-SOFT NetInspector and MIB Browser

Network Monitoring with NetInspector
Net Inspector can also ping, poll, and listen for TRAPs. But, unlike the MIB Browser, Net Inspector provides at-a-glance color-coded status and sends mail messages and/or HTML reports to signal critical events (see Reporting).

For example, this submap (below, right) has been configured to ping all devices every 60 seconds.

When a device goes unreachable, the icon turns yellow, then red, and warning/critical events are generated. When reachability is resumed, the icon turns green—but an event log and "responsability" statistics ensure that transient failures are recorded for later analysis.

In v1.5, similar monitors can be configured to generate SNMP polls or UDP echo messages.
 

In v2.0, a new Internet plug-in will significantly expand Net Inspector's monitoring capability. New TCP objects will monitor server status using SMTP, POP3, FTP, HTTP, NNTP, IMAP, DNS, or Time protocols. For example, this TCP monitor (below, left) tries to log into an FTP server every 60 seconds. New UDP objects (below, right) will monitor status using Daytime, Quote, Echo, or SNMP. You must know the right command/response incantation, expressed in text or hex, to configure each monitor. A single TCP or UDP object can monitor several services on the same device.

We successfully monitored web, file, name, and SNMP servers with our preview plug-in. But we encountered several problems, largely due to the complex parameters required by these monitors. For example, we had trouble monitoring FTP until MG-SOFT supplied outgoing command args (USER anon\r\n for one server, USER anon\n\n for another). We never did sort out why we could monitor our *NIX DNS, but not our NT DNS.

When the problem lies in parsing the server's response, trouble-shooting information is available. But if the server does not like the command Net Inspector is sending, good luck. MG-SOFT is still refining this very useful plug-in; we hope to see more in-depth Help, custom port support, and additional diagnostics in the 2.0 version. We also hope MG-SOFT finds a way to automatically group or combine ICMP, SNMP, TCP, and UDP objects with the same IP address.

Net Inspector includes a powerful but somewhat awkward event manager (below, left). The event manager reports everything Net Inspector does—discovery searches, failed and successful polls, received SNMP traps. Event viewers can display current events (be linked to the event manager) or historical events (be linked to another event viewer). Create a chain of viewers with different filters (below,right) to make it easier to spot important events. You can filter by severity and/or time, but not by source (to be implemented in v2.0). Events must be cleared manually, transferring them to the next history viewer in the chain. Saved events can be reloaded from file into any current event window. Double-click on an event to jump to the source object in the topo map, but don't expect to see much detail in the event properties window.