Networks in schools and businesses grow constantly, and asked to do more and more every day. Every time a new server is installed to perform a new task, that’s one more thing for the network administrator to watch over and keep functional. If something breaks, often the network administrator doesn’t find out until hours or sometimes days later when someone passes them in the hallway or leaves a note on their desk.

Stay Informed with NetworkTrakker

NetworkTrakker is an add-on product to SecureSchool which will help minimize these downtimes and keep the network administrator informed about what is happening on the network. With a combination of standard SNMP queries and custom software installed on the servers, NetworkTrakker gathers vital statistics and information about your various devices and will alert you when a problem occurs. If possible, it will even try to alert you before the problem becomes critical.

Try a FREE 30-day trial now!

NetworkTrakker runs on the current SecureSchool equipment you already have. No new hardware is necessary. If you’d like to try out NetworkTrakker, Contact us and we’d be happy to turn it on for you to use for 30 days.

Analyze and Optimize with NetworkTrakker

Consider a file server on your network that houses the user home directories. If someone uploads a large file (or many large files) to your server, the server could become useless if the drive fills up, disrupting the work of everyone else. Using NetworkTrakker you can monitor the drive capacity on the server. You can configure it to warn you when the drive hits 20% free, then to alert you every few hours when it hits 10% free. Using this method, you become aware of a potential problem before the problem ever occurs.

NetworkTrakker also maintains a history of events for each host and service it monitors. This can be vital when trying to find obscure and repeating problems in networks. For example, if at 1pm every day the SIS server becomes slow responding to HTTP requests, that can help narrow down that something must be happening at 1pm effecting the load on the server. Combining that with the web server logs may reveal that at 1pm someone is running a daily report that causes the load to go up on the server enough that it may not raise a CPU alert, but cause high latency on HTTP due to database load.

NetworkTrakker also has the ability to graph various statistics of different devices on the network. This is most useful for network interfaces on servers, routers, and switches. If a remote building is experiencing slow network access, but another remote network is fine, you can use the graphs in NetworkTrakker to view the statistics for the WAN links to see which one is using all its available bandwidth. Once the offending WAN link is found, you can then check each of the switches and switch ports at the remote location to find which workstation may be causing the problem.

The graphs are also helpful for capacity planning. Using the graphs on the router connecting to the Internet, historical and current data can be used to make assumptions about bandwidth needs for coming years and will help in budget planning for any necessary upgrades.

The graphs that are generated are customizable to your needs. For example, you can make one graph that shows you your inbound bandwidth for your Internet router, plus the inbound bandwidth from each remote location router. This gives you the ability to easily see who the “bandwidth hogs” are. Network graphs can be generated from most devices that support SNMP. Most managed switches support SNMP, as do most routers and servers.

Any device can be polled for ping & packet loss, basic TCP connections, or protocol tests like POP3, SMTP, HTTP, and FTP.

When the client software is installed on a Windows server, data can also be checked for individual service states, disk use, CPU load, RAM use, and swap/paging file use.

NetworkTrakker can monitor APC brand Uninterruptable Power Supplies (UPS) with SNMP management cards for voltage and load conditions, as well as the state (on battery, smart boost, etc.) of the UPS. It may be possible to get this information from other brands of UPS units if they have SNMP management cards as well. Call us with the details and we’d be happy to research your UPS for you.

Try a FREE 30-day trial now!

NetworkTrakker runs on the current SecureSchool equipment you already have. No new hardware is necessary. If you’d like to try out NetworkTrakker, Contact us and we’d be happy to turn it on for you to use for 30 days.