Blog
January 27, 2012
Network administrators want to reduce risk in their networks. An active focus on network monitoring, mapping and alerting is a key step to minimizing risk in your business operations from network slowdowns or outages.
IT people are historically known to be risk-averse. The old adage, “no one ever got fired for choosing IBM” is an example of this approach.
Proactive monitoring of your network provides the details needed to fix performance problems in network devices, services, applications, connections and traffic.
Real-time mapping provides an at-a-glance assessment of your network whether you are using a geographical or hierarchical view.
Smart alerting, configured to issue notifications based on customized thresholds and escalation policies, provides warning of impending outages.
InterMapper’s powerful, flexible, easy-to-use and affordable network analyzer software reduces risk with its low bandwidth polling engine, which can scale to monitor thousands of devices. Whether you are a small company or a large enterprise, InterMapper is a network diagnostic tool that can improve network reliability and reduce risk.
Download a free 30-day trial of InterMapper
January 18, 2012
Our customers love InterMapper network monitoring software. But don’t take our word for it. We recently conducted a customer satisfaction survey, and had a great response.
- Overall, 95% of the respondents indicated that they were in the top 2 categories (“Satisfied” or “Very Satisfied”) with InterMapper as a product.
- 93% of applicable customers indicated that they were in the top 2 satisfaction categories for their interaction with tech support, in terms of knowledge of the responder
- 93% of customers indicated that they were in the top 2 satisfaction categories for the features/benefits and cost of InterMapper
Some comments we received:
- InterMapper is a very valuable/critical component in our daily IT operations. Thanks to everyone at InterMapper who have contributed to such an outstanding product!
- I couldn’t do my job without InterMapper. We have a very small technology department supporting over 1,000 workstations. InterMapper is our eyes and ears on the network
- I’m very satisfied with InterMapper. It meets our needs at a reasonable price point
- Thanks for a great product. We appreciate the careful, timely updates, communication and forums
- With all of our wireless devices I couldn’t imagine not having InterMapper and trying to monitor them. What a great product and makes my job so much easier!
- Excellent product, fairly priced and was very easy to integrate into our existing infrastructure
You are welcome to try a free, 30-day trial of our network monitoring system.
January 10, 2012
We are often asked whether InterMapper can scale to meet the network monitoring demands of the enterprise. The answer is clearly yes. There are many installations of InterMapper for networks with 2,000 or more devices being monitored.
Organizations with very large networks or multiple locations often find that the best design involves using multiple InterMapper servers to deliver robust and scalable network monitoring systems.
See a new series of FAQs on running multiple InterMapper servers for the answers to the following questions:
- In what situations should I use multiple InterMapper servers?
- Can I use virtual servers for my InterMapper servers?
- What is redundant network monitoring and how can I achieve it?
- Can InterMapper scale to monitor very large networks?
- Can InterMapper scale to monitor large distributed networks with many remote sites/regions?
- How do I use InterMapper RemoteAccess to connect to multiple InterMapper servers?
- If I use multiple InterMapper servers, can I still have centralized trend analysis and reporting across my entire enterprise network using InterMapper Reports?
- How do I install InterMapper DataCenter on a central server, and do I need to buy a license to do that?
December 13, 2011
Customers frequently ask, “I have a MIB file from my equipment vendor. Can I use it to see what’s going on with the gear?”
The answer is, “Yes.” We have a new tool that creates a “MIB Viewer” probe that displays all the scalar and table variables of a single SNMP MIB. If InterMapper’s built-in probes don’t already handle your equipment, this tool makes it very easy to create a probe to see what information is available from that network gear.
The tool is a web page. You open the page in your web browser, paste in the text of a MIB, and the bottom of the page displays a complete probe file.
Web Page Demo:
http://download.dartware.com/thirdparty/MIB_Viewer_Probe_Builder/MIBViewerBuilder.html
Or you can download a ZIP archive to your hard drive and run it locally:
http://download.dartware.com/thirdparty/MIB_Viewer_Probe_Builder.zip
Or download it from our Mercurial repository:
https://bitbucket.org/intermapper/imwebfiles/src
Or watch a demo on Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUYoaQvx0aU
If you have comments or suggestions, please send them to support@intermapper.com. Give it a try!
Posted in Blog
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Tagged MIB, probes, SNMP
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December 6, 2011
 InterMapper is the only network mapping software that runs on a wide variety of operating systems, including: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris.
Our unique cross-platform development process, allows us to offer our network monitoring, mapping and alerting software on the widest variety of operating systems of any of our competitors.
Windows
Windows 7/Vista/XP and Windows Server 2008/2003
Mac OS X 10.5 and newer
Lion
Snow Leopard
Leopard
Linux
Red Hat
Ubuntu
Debian
SuSe
Unix
Solaris Sparc
Solaris x86
InterMapper has one agnostic code base which runs on multiple platforms. The various platforms are interoperable – in that our customers can run the InterMapper server on a Windows box and stakeholders can use InterMapper RemoteAccess on a Mac, for example, to view the same maps.
No other network monitoring tool gives you this kind of flexibility.
November 17, 2011
All virtualization solutions (VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V server, or a Citrix XenServer, or Red Hat’s Hypervisor, Parallels, etc.) provide the ability to run multiple “virtual machines” on a single hardware server. Instead of having a number of physical machines providing certain services, you install them as virtual machines on a single server.
This has interesting savings, including:
- Reduce space in the computer room: you can replace a handful to dozens of physical servers with a single high powered server
- Reduce energy consumption: fewer boxes means lower power consumption
- Reduce air conditioning, because of the lower power consumption
- Increased performance: since most servers are used well under 10% of their full power, a network administrator can share the capability of a single high powered server across multiple virtual machines.
- Easy to provision and configure a new server. The network manager can simply clone an existing one. No need to purchase hardware, just duplicate some files on the disk and some settings and it’s on the air.
- Easy upgrade to more powerful hardware: it’s a simple matter to move the single virtual machine onto a more powerful server without buying and configuring new server hardware.
So there’s a powerful case for virtualization. That’s a major reason we’re running VMs here at Dartware.
How can they be monitored?
The virtual machines continue to provide the same services as before. They are in every way fully equivalent to the physical server they replace. If you are doing server monitoring before virtualizing, they will be able to monitor exactly the same way using exactly the same probes, etc.
Thus, if a VM is providing a web service, you can test it with an HTTP probe. The Host Resources probes will still get the processor, memory and disk statistics.
Think of this as end-to-end testing. InterMapper can test the responsiveness of the server, whether it’s via ping, SNMP traffic, host resources, HTTP probes etc. It is irrelevant whether the server is a standalone physical box or a virtualized instance: it’s critical to know that the server is *delivering* the performance that customers need.
November 14, 2011
 Watch this recoded webinar which reveals the latest insights about network monitoring tools and valuable lessons learned through case scenarios describing operational challenges and how network monitoring software helped resolve them.
View the Recorded Webinar
On Thursday October 27th, InterMapper sponsored a webinar for IT professionals on maximizing network uptime and reducing risk with a real-time view of your network.
One of the ways to mitigate risk is to implement a network monitoring system that can proactively identify, locate, and enable you to fix network problems quickly. Monitoring, mapping and alerting software allows you to collect data to analyze and predict the performance of your network in real-time.
Attendees learned how to increase efficiency, reduce costs and mitigate risks by implementing these end-to-end monitoring features:
- Identifying a problem – using network monitors that send alerts regarding unusual performance or unauthorized activities
- Determining the cause of a problem – using a Flows module that pinpoints the IP address at the source
- Locating where the problem is – using a Layer 2 mapping module to show the relevant switch/port
- Capacity planning – monitor bandwidth utilization rates
InterMapper Director John Sutton and InterMapper customer Matt Federoff, CIO of the Vail School District in Vail Arizona, discussed network monitoring trends and the application of state-of-the-art monitoring tools.
November 9, 2011
 New Report Templates We are happy to announce the release of InterMapper 5.5, now featuring enhanced analytics and device label control. The new InterMapper release makes further improvements to its industry leading monitoring and mapping capabilities.
InterMapper’s trusted solution helps optimize network uptime, reduce risks and alert the network administrator of impending issues before network impact.
Major new capabilities include:
- Enhanced Reports module
- Improved control of device labels
- Greater visibility and control of charts and the InterMapper database
- Layer 2 enhancements
With more report types and templates, the enhanced Reports module puts all the data you collect about your network at your fingertips. It allows the network administrator to easily disseminate critical information throughout the organization.
In both device labels and notifier titles/messages, you may use JavaScript to generate the text for labels or notifications. JavaScript has access to variables from probes, as well as certain internal information, which may be used in the labels. For instance, you may display temperature or traffic returned from a device or device specific properties, such as comment, poll interval, etc.
InterMapper 5.5 also gives you greater visibility into and control over chart data, as well as data exported to the InterMapper Database. It is easier to create and view chart data. Additionally, more information is available in the Chart Window and Chart View.
Layer 2 enhancements include an indicator of IP conflicts, the ability to ignore an IP address for Layer 2 mapping, as well as additional flags for spanning tree rout, loop, wireless and virtual machine.
Whether deployed for diagnostics, troubleshooting, compliance, capacity planning or security, InterMapper has the power, flexibility, ease-of-use and affordability the network administrator needs to maintain a healthy network.
A free, 30-day, fully functional trial version of InterMapper is currently available.
November 2, 2011
 At yesterday’s Boston Network Users Group (BNUG) meeting at the Microsoft offices in Waltham, MA, InterMapper CEO Rich Brown gave a presentation on “How Layer 2 Network Mapping Can Identify Problems and Speed Resolutions”
As IT infrastructure becomes more critical to an organization’s operations, performance monitoring continues to be an important component of network administration. A powerful, easy-to–use and flexible network monitoring, mapping and alerting solution can help maintain a healthy network.
But knowing that there is a problem and even what that problem is may not be enough. Where is the problem? State-of-the-art network monitoring tools now include capabilities to automatically identify which switch ports the IPs are connected to. Rich explored the various ways that Layer 2 mapping can help the Network Manager resolve problems faster using a network monitoring, mapping and alerting tool.
Microsoft seems to be a member of the Red Sox Nation. Microsox!!
October 24, 2011
InterMapper CEO Rich Brown is quoted in the September issue of University Business. The issue features an article on how schools are switching to cloud-based email. In order to reduce costs and improve service, some universities are transitioning to providing students with cloud-based email.
The article quoted InterMapper CEO Rich Brown, “Migrating email to the cloud offers campuses substantial financial savings and eliminates on-site mail system infrastructure. Schools avoid email server backups, shrink email support time, off-load maintenance, and bypass the need for server-based anti-virus, anti-spam and email filtering products”
Read the full article here:
http://www.universitybusiness.com/article/cloud-email-good-bad-and-uptime
The article mentions potential drawback as well, such as: security, privacy, integration, migration and downtime.
As schools at all levels continue to adopt more cloud based services, InterMapper can be used as a network monitoring tool to assure these services are running optimally.
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