Auckland business and technology consultancy Business Mechanix has come up with a system for the remote monitoring of servers, routers and other networked devices.
The product, Max, works on any piece of equipment which create log files or SNMP (simple network management protocol) alerts.
Business Mechanix demonstrated Max in Auckland and Wellington recently and attracted interest, Business Mechanix director Wayne Stewart says.
“They went well, though no decisions have been made yet.”
Max is based on a central monitoring and logging server which collects information from the equipment – servers, routers, firewalls – and alerts their operator when a problem is looming.
“The system automatically sends alerts when performance and availability thresholds are met,” Stewart says. Alerts can be sent out via email, pager, text message or any wireless handset that running Windows for Pocket PC.
“That could be information relating to a router or firewall, or even a printer that’s out of paper – you can monitor pretty much any device.”
As well as alerting operators of those devices when preset performance levels are reached, or about to be reached, Max can compile a track record of breaches, informing users of trends.
“For example, with hard drive usage, you can see all your free space gradually being chewed up – being able to see the trend, you can predict when you will run out of space.” The graphs are displayed through a web interface and, in certain circumstances, the problem identified can be fixed remotely.
Max is similar to remote monitoring products offered by OpenView and Tivoli, Stewart says, “but the closest products to Max that I know about is BMC’s Patrol”. Stewart claims Max will do many - but not all - of the tasks those other products do at a lower cost.
“A lot of those other systems are quite modularised and are licensed according to the different types of devices you monitor, whereas we have one system with the ability to monitor anything.”
Max can be licensed for $12,000.