It displays status information as web pages or WML pages for WAP-enabled devices. These web pages have the systems monitored down the left-hand side of the page, the tests for each system across the top of the page. These results in a matrix of color-coded dots on screen. Green is Good, Red is Bad. In addition, the background color of the status pages is always the color of the most serious condition of any element being monitored at that time.

It uses client-server architecture combined with methods that both push and pull data. Network testing are done by polling all monitored services from a single machine, and reporting these results to a central location. If you want local system information, you can install a client on the local machine, which will send CPU, process, disk space, and log-file status reports in periodically. Each report is timestamped with an expiration date. This lets us know when a report is no longer valid, which is usually an indication of a more serious problem.

It's not much good if your monitoring system can fail and not tell you of the problem. It supports redundancy through allowing you to run multiple instances in parallel. This means that the clients can report into multiple Web Displays and Notification servers.

It sends all status reports from client to server over port 1984. The IANA has assigned it this port, and the protocol itself is open. Limited support for SNMP trap handling is supported using third-party plug-ins.

It includes support for testing ftp, http, https, smtp, pop3, dns, telnet, imap, nntp, and ssh servers. Support for additional tests is easily added.

Beyond monitoring for high availability, you will also need to manage your system for optimal performance. It alerts you of a condition, you can then gather domain specific information and quickly resolve performance issues. It is a real-time diagnostic tool designed to diagnose and resolve performance bottlenecks before your users are affected.

If you choose to install in client on a local machine, it will monitor disk space, CPU usage, messages, and can check that important processes are up and running.

It has a sophisticated notification rule set, not for the faint of heart. You can notify based on time-of-day, machine, or the test that failed. In addition we support an initial delay before paging (useful to cut down on late night false alarms), page-only-every defined amount of time, paging groups, acknowledgement, and escalation. Built in support for e-mail paging, alphanumeric paging and SMS pages. Under the Unix/Linux server platform, you can even create your own custom notification procedure.

It supports reporting, which will allow you to determine whether Service Level Agreements are being met. In addition, we provide access to historical status information so you can see what the problem was at any given time.

It supports plug-ins. You can write plug-ins in any language, and we include several samples to make it easy. In addition, from around the world have written hundreds of plug-ins to monitor everything from Oracle Databases to CPU temperature on Solaris machines.

It is very flexible. Warning and alarm levels are all easily definable and refining. The Web Display can be easily customized. We have hooks into other products, like MRTG for bandwidth monitoring. Since you have the source code, you can easily figure out what it is doing, and change it to suit your needs.