Re: Basic Network Monitor

Mike,
As Mark mentions, 2007 has the functionality to link to a data source. The
real challange here is to have an application that can gather what you want
to monitor and not put your network/components into meltdown. The standard
products out there (HP, Tivoli, CA, etc.) have a lot of safeguards under the
covers to protect users from themselves and are usually run on dedicated
servers so that they don't impact production applications. This stability
comes at a cost. The standard consulting response is usually "clients want
three aspects in a solution "good, cheap, and pretty; unfortunately you only
get two out of three". Visio is pretty, now as a manager you must make the
decision on the other two.
If you don't want to develop one of your own, look for something that can
gather the information you want and stores it in a data store that can be
queried.
Al
"Mike Smith" <Mike Smith@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:46D384B0-9B74-448A-BBDA-BE260E680915@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Visio provides a wonderful environment for me as an IT Manager to
inventory
the infrastructure I am responsible for. My diagrams have grown over the
years and include a whole lot of "dumb" items (notes on cable runs;
mini-hubs: etc) as well as inteligent devices (Cisco routers & switches;
servers; etc). Because of the effort I've put into this product it has
become one of my primary management tools.

What I'm after now is to take it to the next level and provide dynamic
status of some (not all) of these elements. I need to indicate if a link
is
up by showing a distant device is alive or not through color (red for
down;
green for up). This is pretty basic stuff and I have seen in these forums
some discussions involving scripting, however, I don't have a knowledge of
scripting and don't have the budget to hire somebody to build and maintain
a
solution like this.

I've looked at some other products but they are either way too complicated
or are pitched at mapping rather than monitoring. I think for my
requirements basic ping with some services/ports monitoring would be more
than sufficient. Alerting would be nice but historical analysis isn't a
requirement. The reason for this is that in a small to medium enterprise
my
SLAs are based on "is it up?" not "how often is it down?". Al I need to
know
is what are my current issues so I can see what needs to be resolved.

If there is a commercial product out there or an add-on then please inform
us in this forum. Otherwise please seriously consider including such a
basic
addition to the Visio network functions.

regards, Mike Smith

smith@xxxxxxxxxxxx

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