Regular monitoring of your network and devices can save thousands of dollars every year, not to mention the relief from stress and fear of reputational loss. That said, you need the right tools to ensure that your monitoring efforts provide the results you want.
One tool that can greatly enhance your organization's monitoring is SolarWinds ipMonitor. Coming from the stables of SolarWinds, a leading company in the world of computer monitoring, ipMonitor is a comprehensive tool for monitoring your servers, devices, and applications.
Read on as we talk about ipMonitor's features, pros and cons, and its benefits to your organization.
What is SolarWinds ipMonitor?
SolarWinds ipMonitor is a lightweight monitoring tool that works well for all kinds of IT environments. As it can monitor up to 2,500 servers and devices simultaneously. A highlight of ipMonitor is its dashboard, which displays the status of all devices, servers, and applications that it monitors. Besides, it also tracks the performance of key metrics like CPU and memory usage. It checks the performance of critical services and processes as well.
Here are some snapshots to give you a visual understanding of how ipMonitor looks.
System Requirements
ipMonitor is a relatively lightweight monitoring solution that doesn't require a ton of resources. The minimum system requirements are:
- CPU Single core 2GHz
- RAM 512 MB
- Hard drive 240 MB free space
- Operating systems Windows 8, 10, and 11, Windows 2012, 2012 R2, and 2016. All these devices must have the .NET framework 3.5 or higher.
Note that these are minimum requirements, and these could change based on the number of monitors you plan to use and the number of devices you want to monitor. You can even run this application in a virtual environment, especially if you want to scale quickly.
Next, let's look at the key features of SolarWinds ipMonitor.
Key Features of SolarWinds ipMonitor
SolarWinds ipMonitor comes with many unique features that enhance the efficiency of the monitoring process for your organization. Here's a look at the important features and what they can monitor.
- Monitors Ports When you monitor your common ports, you can have better control over all that's happening within your network and the devices using it for communication. SolarWinds ipMonitor comes with many monitors to closely watch the status and performance of all the common ports in your network. The setup process for monitoring the common ports is also easy, thanks to ipMonitor's out-of-the-box configurations for common ports. All that you have to do is select a pre-built configuration for a port and start monitoring it.
- Checks Database Availability The database is an important aspect of your tech stack, and this is why ipMonitor monitors it closely to reduce any disastrous consequences. It continuously checks the status and availability of databases to ensure that your applications and websites are not impacted. Specifically, ipMonitor periodically sends queries, retrieves data, and analyzes the results to identify any gaps or discrepancies. In case of delays or performance drops, ipMonitor sends alerts to the respective teams.
- Tracks Hardware and Infrastructure Health ipMonitor can track the performance of any aspect of any hardware device. Some of the aspects you can monitor include temperature, humidity, fan speed, battery consumption, availability, etc. All that you'll have to do is set up separate monitors for each aspect of each device and collate the data for meaningful insights. You have the option to even set the frequency between tests. Typically, you can choose a value from 60 to 300 seconds as the monitoring frequency.
- Dashboards Another important feature of ipMonitor is its comprehensive dashboard. You can customize the dashboard to include any monitoring information that's relevant to your business. The advantage of these dashboards is that they act as a one-stop place to gather all the information and use them well to make decisions.
- Monitor HTTP and HTTPS ipMonitor has an HTTP and an HTTPS monitor that can check your HTTP and HTTPS endpoints respectively. With these monitors, you can know if a web server is available to handle these requests. When it comes to HTTPS requests, the pages can be static, dynamic, or even Microsoft Active Server pages. In case of any issues, ipMonitor sends alerts to the respective members, so they can take the necessary actions.
Thus, these are some important features of ipMonitor, and when used well, they can provide enormous benefits for your organization.
Benefits of ipMonitor for Your Business
ipMonitor can benefit your business in many ways. Here's a look at some of them.
Setup Wizards
A salient aspect of ipMonitor is that it comes with many setup wizards to help get a functionality up and running within a few minutes. This means no more extensive scripts for configuring the monitoring of any device. With these wizards, you can quickly install the tool, discover devices, and configure alerts for specific monitors like databases, with little effort. You can even test the parameters before moving them to a production environment.
Extensive Database Monitoring
SolarWinds ipMonitor is one of the few tools that allow you to extensively monitor the availability and performance of your databases. It offers three unique monitors to achieve the above monitoring goals. They are:
- ADO User Experience (SQL Query) This monitor queries a database, retrieves the data, and analyzes it to monitor the performance of any SQL database or other supported sources.
- ADO (SQL Connect) This monitor connects to SQL servers and other supported sources and checks the ability of databases to support connections. It also ensures that enough connection handles are available and that accounts/applications can readily access the required database tables.
- SQL Server Performance Counters This monitor opens multiple connections to determine the overall health of your SQL servers.
With these monitors, you can quickly identify the failure points and act on them before it impacts your wider organization.
Monitors any SNMP Device
As ipMonitor uses SNMP requests to monitor the health and availability of devices, you can extend its monitoring capabilities to any SNMP-enabled device. With ipMonitor, you can even gauge the responsiveness and performance of these SNMP devices in real time. Opt for the Custom SNMP Wizard to configure and deploy multiple monitors for different SNMP-enabled devices. The best part is you can track all these devices through a central dashboard.
Provides a Comprehensive View
One of the biggest benefits of ipMonitor is that it collates data from different devices and sources, and brings them together to give you a comprehensive view of your infrastructure's health and performance. With such a comprehensive understanding, you can make informed decisions about the state of your infrastructure and its devices. In particular, this information can help with capacity planning, budgeting, forecasting, and more.
Enables Proactive Monitoring
ipMonitor takes a proactive approach to monitoring. It helps you to identify gaps as they emerge, so you can fix them before it leads to disastrous results. Such proactive measures can save tons of time, effort, money, and possibly even your reputation when compared to a reactive approach to troubleshooting. Also, ipMonitor provides this information in real-time, and in turn, enhances your efficiency and decision-making processes.
Saves Costs
ipMonitor can help you save money, as it is comprehensive, automated, and is a good replacement for onsite IT staff who will have to continuously monitor every aspect of your network's functioning. It's also highly efficient, as the chances of human errors go down greatly. Furthermore, ipMonitor helps you to proactively identify issues and fix them, so you can better plan for resources and their associated costs. Above everything, this tool saves you money on costly repairs and downtimes, as gaps that lead to failures can be addressed proactively. Due to all these factors, ipMonitor saves a lot of money for you and undoubtedly provides a good Return on Investment (ROI).
Highly Customizable
This platform from SolarWinds is highly customizable to meet the individual needs of your organization. You can change the configurations, include the monitors based on your infrastructure's requirements, pick the ports, databases, and other devices you want to monitor, and more. Based on what you need, ipMonitor will provide the necessary information, and in turn, you can use this data to make informed decisions.
Generates Reports
ipMonitor comes with extensive reporting templates that you can leverage to generate many types of reports. You can use these reports for internal auditing, sharing with relevant stakeholders, decision-making, and more. Some of these reports can also be used as proof of compliance with existing standards.
In all, ipMonitor helps you to stay on top of the performance and availability of your network and infrastructure. More importantly, it enables you to take a proactive approach to troubleshooting, so you can minimize the consequences of downtime. In the process, you can also save money on IT costs.
Next, let's look at the Pros and Cons of ipMonitor, as this can help you to better decide the suitability of this tool for your organization.
Pros:
- Works well on SNMP-enabled devices.
- Saves costs
- Boosts availability and performance of your network and infrastructure.
- You can customize the alerts and reports to suit your organization.
Cons:
- May not be scalable for large and complex networks.
- There could be a learning curve involved, depending on the technical skills and experience of your employees.
- Some of these features may be overwhelming for Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs).
Now that you know the pros and cons, let's step into a brief review of ipMonitor.
SolarWinds ipMonitor Review
SolarWinds ipMonitor is a comprehensive monitoring solution that's lightweight and relatively easy to install. It requires only a few resources and, with them, identifies many network and device-related issues in your infrastructure. All these are backed by good technical support from SolarWinds and the monitoring community at large.
Moving on to the functionality, ipMonitor supports SNMP versions 1,2, and 3, WMI, and application-specific scans. Essentially, this translates to extensive monitoring capabilities for most devices used today. Besides devices, it also scans web servers and applications to identify security gaps, latency issues, and more.
This tool uses monitors to measure every aspect of devices. Some possible aspects can include temperature, humidity, battery usage, fan speeds, ping requests, and more. It gathers such pertinent information and displays them on an intuitive dashboard, so you can identify issues and their root cause immediately. Armed with such information, you can fix the issues proactively, and ensure minimal impact on your organization. Also, ipMonitor sends alerts when one or more of these values deviate greatly from the established baseline values.
Another key capability is reporting. You can generate the reports you need for further analysis and decision-making. Some of these reports can be used for compliance as well. In this sense, ipMonitor is extensive and can give you a comprehensive idea of the state of your infrastructure. Based on this information, you can take the necessary measures to improve the availability and performance of your infrastructure.
The interface is simple and easy to navigate. You can start with the dashboard and drill down to specific details by clicking on the displayed information. It even provides all the information you want in real time, so you can find problems as they occur. Furthermore, you can also compare real-time information with historical data to understand deviations and trends.
Undoubtedly, ipMonitor can be a good tool to have in your monitoring arsenal, as it can point to problems and their root causes. In turn, this can help your organization to save more money while ensuring the continuity of systems and services for your employees, end users, and other stakeholders.
Before we end, a quick note on the pricing.
Pricing
SolarWinds ipMonitor starts from $1,570.
Given its capabilities and the savings it offers for your organization in the long run, we can say that this investment will reap rich benefits for your organization.
Click here for a fully functional 14-day free trial. You can also reach out to the sales team for a custom quote, depending on your requirements.
Final Words
To conclude, SolarWinds ipMonitor is a good choice for enterprises that are looking to monitor their devices and networks to ensure their availability and good performance. However, this is not the best choice if you have extremely complex networks with millions of nodes, in which case, other advanced tools like Applications Monitor might help.
Ideally, start with a list of your requirements including the devices you want to monitor, and evaluate if ipMonitor covers them all, which most likely would, especially if all the devices are SNMP-enabled.
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