MG-SOFT Net Inspector Fault and Performance Manager About the Software

Net Inspector is a client/server application supporting distributed management, meaning that two or more remote polling engines can be deployed to facilitate efficient management of your network.

The server module continually monitors network services and important SNMP parameters (depending on configuration) on your network devices and triggers alarms when problems occur, e.g., if a device or service stops responding, if SNMP variable crosses the threshold value, etc. The software has a built-in support for monitoring the status of a variety of network services (HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, DNS, SMTP, IMAP, IMAPS, POP3, SSH, Telnet, NNTP, NNPTS, LDAP, LDAPS, IPP, LPD, MsSQL, MySQL and Oracle service), and lets you monitor other, user-defined services. Besides actively polling devices, Net Inspector also receives SNMP Trap and Inform notifications, which are sent to it by managed devices when important events occur. The software translates received SNMP notifications to ITU X.733-compliant alarms, stores alarms in a database and dispatches information about alarms to connected clients.

Net Inspector Client, on the other hand, is a pure Java™ application that connects to the server through a TCP/IP connection (which can be secured through encrypted SSH channel) and provides a graphical user interface that lets you view and manage alarms on managed objects, monitor the status and performance statistics of managed objects, as well as configure the client and certain parameters of the server application. Net Inspector Client can be launched by simply clicking the relevant link in the included Net Inspector Java Web Start page.

Net Inspector employs advanced network discovery methods and algorithms that let it automatically discover network devices supporting SNMP or ICMP Ping protocol and graphically present the layer 2 (physical) and layer 3 (logical) topology of the discovered network.

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MG-SOFT Net Inspector Java Client main window displaying the network topology and active alarms (left section) and several performance management windows showing the device performance and system resource utilization charts and data (right section).

Discovered devices are represented by icons that are automatically linked with connection lines and mapped onto layered maps that reveal how devices are logically arranged into networks and subnets on the IP level. The integrated scheduler can automatically run the network discovery operation in regular intervals in order to detect new network devices and changes in the network topology and update the Net Inspector configuration accordingly. Due to this automatism and its user-friendly interface, Net Inspector lets you start monitoring your network almost instantly, without any special training.

In addition to fault management, Net Inspector now incorporates also the full-featured performance management functionality (provided by the integrated MG-SOFT Performance Manager application), effectively covering both essential network management areas. Advantage of the integrated fault and performance management is that full history of alarms and performance data is available at the central point, which allows you to see a more realistic picture of the health of the network and let you bring educated decisions, based on trend reports, regarding its maintenance. Further advantage is that the integrated system enables you to monitor virtually any parameter available through SNMP (vendor-specific metrics, vendor-specific traps), and let you deploy distributed polling engines that enable load balancing and better performance of the management system. Distributed management also makes the system easily scalable without seriously degrading its performance, so the management system's capacity can seamlessly grow with your network.

Besides, Net Inspector now incorporates NetFlow monitoring that measures the amount and type of network traffic and offers detailed IP traffic statistics identifying the applications that generate the most traffic (in packets and bytes), endpoints (IP addresses) that receive and send the most data, protocols that are used most, etc. This information is obtained by collecting, analyzing and aggregating NetFlow packets exported by the NetFlow-enabled devices. Monitoring IP traffic flows effectively complements the standard SNMP monitoring and together they offer a valuable insight into the network infrastructure and bandwidth utilization and let you easily identify the causes of congestions, determine where to apply Quality of Service, optimize resource usage, etc. NetFlow monitoring enables more accurate capacity planning and ensures that resources are used in accordance with your corporate goals.

Furthermore, Net Inspector also lets you monitor the VoIP Quality-Of- Service metrics (like MOS, jitter, latency, packet loss, etc.) on devices implementing the IP SLA VoIP jitter functionality (e.g., Cisco routers).

The software can perform various actions when network events occur. In addition to sending e-mails and executing arbitrary commands (e.g., to fix specific network problems in an automated fashion), Net Inspector can notify users about important alarms also by sending SMS (Short Message Service) text messages through an attached mobile phone.

In addition to the standard user-based authentication mechanism and associated access rights, Net Inspector also lets you configure and assign different user views to users. User views differ in respect to what managed objects they contain. This principle enables effective delegation of the network supervision activities to different staff members and even end-users.

Net Inspector is available in three editions. The LITE edition is a fault management platform suitable for small networks, while the WorkGroup and the Enterprise editions let you efficiently monitor the status, health and performance of medium- and large-sized networks.

Net Inspector Server 2010 is available for 32-bit and 64-bit MS Windows operating systems (Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, and Windows 7). A version for RHEL Linux is to be available in the near future. Net Inspector Client, on the other hand, runs on all operating systems with the Java Runtime Environment (JRE), version 6.0 (a.k.a. 1.6) or later. Currently supported database management systems are PostgreSQL and MS SQL Server.

Net Inspector development has started in 1995 to provide an SNMP management platform running on 32-bit Windows operating systems (Windows NT 3.5), because at that time no robust and reliable SNMP management platforms running on that OS were available on the market. This means that MG-SOFT has been actively developing and maintaining this particular product for about 15 years already and that, as of now, the product is fully customer proven, robust and reliable fault and performance management platform.