Introducing MonitorWare Console
MonitorWare Console is the newest member of the MonitorWare product line. It is
scheduled to be released as final version around July 2003.
MonitorWare Console is meant to work in conjunction with MonitorWare Agent.
In this case, MonitorWare agent gathers event data while MonitorWare Console
analyzes it. Once the data has been gathered by MonitorWare Agent from the whole network and logged into a central database, MonitorWare Console
comes into picture with its strong analytical abilities. The gathered data from the whole network is worthless if you don’t know how to take advantage of such a great amount of data. If you don’t have any useful and practical tool like MonitorWare Console, it’s like searching for a
needle in a hay stack. MonitorWare Console helps in this searching process and enables the Network Administrators to collect useful information about their network.
MonitorWare Console is a very powerful tool that will facilitate the Network Administrators to analyze their network from tip to toe and will give an in-depth perspective about what’s going on in their system. MonitorWare Agent together with MonitorWare Console can be used to build an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) to prevent your network against black hat community and augment the overall security of your network.
MonitorWare Console will provide the following major modules.
- Views
- Reports
- Devices
- Knowledge Base
A brief introduction of each module is given below.
Views
“Views” is one of the most vital modules of MonitorWare Console. It gives the user an ability to define his/her own useful views that will help him/her in understanding the overall system state. The concept of “Hierarchical Views” has been used in MonitorWare console, such that the user can define various hierarchies and the data will be filtered according to those hierarchies. Thus at every level of a single view we have very handy information and this can take the Network Administrator right to the problematic and knotty area in his/her network. These views can be Auto Refreshed after specified interval of time that gives the Network Administrator an opportunity to view closely the latest records that are being logged into the system according to that view definition. The data of a particular view can also be exported as an excel file for further reference.
Reports
Another very important feature of MonitorWare Console is its Reporting Module. MonitorWare Console comes with some extraordinarily useful reports about the overall network. MonitorWare Console has a very powerful component called Job Manager. As a user, your task is to simply specify the time at which you want to generate the reports. You can either ask MonitorWare Console to save the generated report on the hard disk or you can ask it to email it to the specified recipients. Once you have done these settings in the Job Manager, you can relax because MonitorWare Console will send that report on your email address (or save it on the disk) daily at the specified time and you can take a quick look at the state of your system without doing any extra effort.
Devices:
With this module, you can keep track of all the machines and devices in your network by creating a profile for each. MonitorWare Console also helps discover new reporting devices in the system automatically.
Knowledge Base:
Last but not the least, with this module, you can gradually build a repository of interesting and helpful articles and you can relate these articles with different event ids and devices. Once you have this repository in place, you can keep track of important notes and technical details or articles regarding your system from this centralized Knowledge Base. MonitorWare Console also comes with strong searching abilities. For any device or any specific event id, you can retrieve all the articles that are related to it with just a click of a button, which means that the efforts that you put in to solve a problem don’t go waste for the future. Once you encounter the same problem in future, you will simply turn to the MonitorWare Console’s Knowledge Base module and you would have a ready-made solution for you in the form of articles and notes.
Note that these are just some major modules of MonitorWare Console. Apart from these it also has a lot of other useful modules (see details in MonitorWare Console Manual) including, Deletion Module, Time Zone Module, Users Module, ICMP Lookup module etc.
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