News Room

December 04, 2000, Issue: 840
Section: NET INFRASTRUCTURE
Job One: Stay Operational
Two companies introduce gear that helps keep Web sites from crashing
CHRISTINE ZIMMERMAN

E-commerce initiatives, content management and B2B marketplaces are important topics to enterprise managers. But they don't mean a thing if the equipment fails and the site is down.

The overriding priority of keeping things up and operating makes network monitoring gear essential. Two vendors have introduced gear they claim can help IT managers stay on top of their networks. NetBotz has introduced monitoring appliances that check the environment of the server room, while AlertSite has enhanced its service that detects slow site response times and disruptions.

NetBotz customer Glyn Meek, CEO of TriActive Inc., a company that offers systems management over the Web, said the NetBotz monitoring appliance, RackBotz, helped even while it was in the beta-test stage.

"We found out that on weekends, the air conditioning is turned off in the building. Temperatures in our server room were getting way out of range. NetBotz paged us," said Meek. "They really saved our service."

TriActive offers outsourced systems management over the Web. It offers NetBotz products to its customers as well as uses the equipment in-house. After TriActive tested the product and bought it for its own use, the vendor decided to offer it to its customers.

NetBotz uses Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) agents to check the operating condition of switches, routers and servers. If there is any cause for concern, IT staff receive either an e-mail or a page. IT managers can also check the network at any time, via the Web.

"What we do saves a lot of blown weekends for IT managers," said Gerry Cullen, NetBotz vice president of marketing and business development. "If an IT manager loses a server or a switch and has to re-load all of the data, there is pain."

Cullen pointed out the importance of monitoring gear with this example: "At 95 degrees Fahrenheit, Cisco routers start making mistakes. If the cabinet gets to 105 degrees, pieces inside the router fail altogether. The router is trashed because it cannot dissipate its internal heat. And it easily can be 90 degrees in a cabinet, even though room temperature is 75."

NetBotz is available in a wall-mounted product called WallBotz and a rack-mounted product called RackBotz. The products sell for $895 and $995, respectively. During the fourth quarter, the company will introduce software that monitors the internal workings of the equipment itself.

The downloadable software applications, called Crawlerz, run on both the RackBotz and WallBotz platforms, and keep tabs on devices like servers, routers, switches, back-up power units and other SNMP-enabled devices. Crawlerz also uses the standard alarm notification via pager and e-mail.

Meanwhile, AlertSite has its own take on network monitoring. The vendor offers a service that visits Web sites around the clock, as customers might, checking for response times and site availability.

"The last thing an IT manage wants to hear is, 'I can't get to your site,' " said Ken Gross, president of AlertSite. "He wants to find problems before the customer does."

New features of the vendor's monitoring service include: full-page monitoring, which measures the loading time of each individual element and the total loading time of the page; dynamic reporting, which lets IT managers check reports any time of day; trace routes, which tracks the results of each hop; DNS lookup, which provides an automatic IP lookup by AlertSite for every test conducted; and follow redirection, which follows users anytime they are redirected to another site, to make sure they arrive at their destination.

Basic monitoring ranges from $9.95 to $49.95 per month per URL. Full-page monitoring is available for an additional fee.

AlertSite: 877-302-5378; www.alertsite.com