I've written previously about a service called mon.itor.us from Monitis, Inc where you can get free monitor services of your web sites, servers and domain names. I love that service and I think I've been using it to monitor our DNS and HTTP servers fro about a year now and it's been working fantastic. The beauty is that you get graphs showing for example the ping time from US, Germany and Austria to your servers so you can see if it's just your Internet connection that's down or the servers.

Just a few seconds ago I got an email from them letting me know that they've launched a new service monitoring SNMP devices. SNMP is short for Simple Network Management Protocol and here's a short summary from Wikipedia:

SNMP is used in network management systems to monitor network-attached devices for conditions that warrant administrative attention. It consists of a set of standards for network management, including an Application Layer protocol, a database schema, and a set of data objects.

In laymen terms it's used for printers etc

So why would you need something like this? Well it's always nice to have someone monitor your devices/servers and send you reports by email . That way you know that everything is working and when something stop working you know for how long the outage was.

Here are the main features from their web site:

• Remote Monitoring
• 100% Web based
• Managed Monitoring Service (Software as a Service)
• Monthly/Weekly Reporting
• Alerting via SMS, email, IM, RSS
• Distributed
• Agents Based

I haven't tried this service myself, but if it's anything like mon.itor.us you wont be disapointed. Setup your own SNMP monitoring account at www.monitorsnmp.com

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 at 9:54 pm and is filed under Antivirus & Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.