Free Tools Need Help: InterMapper Provides It

Enterprise Networks & Servers, Sep 2004 by Patterson, Mike

There are lots of free tools out there to help you with system and network management. Previous columns have covered some of these and in future issues we will investigate some more. But free tools will only get you so far, so this month let's focus on a great tool called InterMapper.

InterMapper is a network monitoring and alerting tool available from Dartware (www.intermapper.com). It queries routers, switches and hubs using SNMP to receive and display critical data about traffic, utilization and errors. I liked it so much that I immediately reconfigured my own product Denika to work with it (I'll discuss that combo at the end).

Here are a few of the reasons why I like this tool so much.

Firstly, for all you fans of freeware, it is free for up to five licenses. So go ahead and download and try it out on a few computers. Once that convinces you, it costs $495 for 25 devices up to $2395 for unlimited licenses. It's also very flexible. As well as Windows, InterMapper runs on Linux, Solaris, Mac and BSD.

InterMapper lets you import really nice maps as backgrounds with a wide range of colors and icons. While some network monitoring tools have limited icons, this tool allows you to utilize realistic shapes and colors or vary the size from large to small. I've imported AutoCAD and Visio maps, for instance, and ended up with great looking maps and diagrams of the network. InterMapper provides a historical view of various data. You can easily create strip charts to show how different traffic, utilization, error rates, etc. have changed over time. It also includes the ability to view the state of another map through an icon on the main map, and lets you drill down to see the details of the sub-map.

In addition to network traffic flows, InterMapper monitors Web, mail, directory, and dozens of other types of services. Use the built-in probes, write your own TCP or SNMP-based probes, or Nagios or Big Brother programs.

It works with plug-ins (are basically scripts that can be executed). If they fail, it affects the color of the icon.

Traffic Patterns

When you use InterMapper's console rather than viewing it over the Web, the busier connections between network devices display animated dotted lines (known as ants) that become larger and move according to traffic volume and pattern.

It's very handy to be able to drill down and view the history of previous outages on each device or in each area of the network. InterMapper makes this a piece of cake.

It's commonplace for carriers to insist they are meeting SLAs when they appear to be performing relatively poorly. It takes good graphs and stats to prove your case and InterMapper provides this. You can set thresholds for alerts on SLAs.

For example, every time any service falls below 95 percent of the SLA, you get alerted. Alternatively, you can view such information on the screen. Anything marked dark orange indicates service below 100 percent so you can see the current picture at a glance. This is important when you have several hundred devices running as you need to be able to detect the problem areas in a few seconds.

While you can drill down into a whole lot of detail, it's refreshing to get all the key data on one screen. InterMapper's main screen gives you a bird's eye view of the network. You can see how many devices are down, where you are running out of disk space or have machines running with a lack of RAM. From there you can drill down into the problem areas

Points to Watch

1. InterMapper docs not monitor NT services out of the box.

2. Its online help features are okay, but may not answer all your questions.

3. Its Web features limit you to only viewing the state of the network. You can't configure anything over the Web.

4. I've found InterMapper to be compatible with just about everything with a few small exceptions: PCAnywhere on Windows, Java 1.4.2 on MacOS X, and Java on FreeBSD.

As I mentioned earlier, InterMapper so impressed me that I integrated it with my own Denika Performance Trendcr. Denika is a capacity and resource trending tool that automates and provides up to 500 leading indicator reports on bandwidth consumption/availability, disk space usage, CPU and memory utilization as well as non-SNMP gathered data. Powered by MRTG and RRDTool, the historical reports are displayed in daily, weekly, monthly and yearly format.

Denika lends an executive level interface to InterMapper that displays: high-level maps of down devices; devices with abnormal availability, low hard drive space, CPU utilization, memory utilization and response time; and interfaces with abnormal utilization

Denika puts the performance reports inside the InterMapper device view on the Web page which is where most people would expect to see them. It also inserts the associated InterMapper polling events inside the device view and gives the administrator the ability to color code them. Then il adds links for telncl and browser launches. All in all, this brings about a dramatic change to the look and feel of the InterMapper interface.