Since I started working in IT almost 20 years ago – I’ve been involved in system monitoring in one way or another with all the major operating systems that have come and gone – and those that remain. A lot of suppliers developed their own proprietary systems and a few software development companies such as HP and IBM and others brought enterprise monitoring solutions to the market. A few years ago I was researching integrated monitoring systems for a client and discovered a product that covered some areas that previously I had used specialist software to monitor. That package was Intellipool Network Monitor (INM) from Intellipool at www.intellipool.se
In this and future articles I will be detailing the various uses for INM in a demanding and diverse environment where most IT managers find themselves with the range and complexity of systems that they control and manage.
I recently spoke with Robert Aronsson – the lead developer of Intellipool Network Monitoring and asked him how the software came to be.
Robert started out working in Sweden as an system administrator on IBM OS/390, AS/400 , various Unix systems, Windows NT (still an infant in those days), OS/2 and Novell Netware. The idea of developing a system that did a lot of the routine monitoring and reporting jobs was born out of the frustration of doing the same task every day, and spending most of his time putting out fires rather than be proactively able to see issues before they became problems. He found that the time saved by not having to do this daily routine could help to improve things that got left behind due to time constraints.
After a few jobs here and there, he started Intellipool together with a friend and after a couple of years as consultants in the defence industry launched INM roughly 6 years ago.
Asking Robert what the future holds for INM –
“We will continue to expand the product beyond just monitoring, its a bit early to go public with our next move, for competitive reasons, but it will be something that most sys admins use every hour of the day – I think that will be a distinguishingfeature of INM, haven’t seen anything like that in any other monitoring system so far.”
In conclusion – one unique feature of Intellipool Network Monitor as far as I have found is the wide selection of operating systems it can monitor, without needing to install anything on the monitored host.
Supported operating systems:
AIX (4.2 and above)
CentOS
Debian
Fedora
FreeBSD
HP-UX
Generic Linux
OpenBSD
OpenSUSE 10.2
Red Hat Enterprise Server
Solaris
Ubuntu
Windows NT, 2000, XP, 2003 and Vista
In the next article – I will be covering the types of things that you can use Intellipool Network Monitor to look after and the options that the application presents.