In today’s world organizations cannot afford systems to fail without knowing about the failure. Banks, Cellular communications providers, ISPs, Security providers and many more generate their revenue from communications systems and when these devices fail, they lose revenue.
This is especially true after hours when there is no support staff to monitor these systems. When systems fail at night, these events are only noticed the next day after huge financial losses. In most cases this is also true during the daytime. Network administrators only know about failures when customers start to complain about service outages.
Venture Communications have had many requests from clients to provide a product and services to help them manage their infrastructure proactively.
Due to the geographical diversity of our clients, remote monitoring is very difficult due to connectivity constraints. Leased lines are simply not available and satellite communications are too expensive for monitoring purposes. Security is also a main concern and most organizations do not want any third party to have unrestricted access into their LANS.
Installation, configuration, product updates and maintenance are also some of the impediments organizations are faced with when monitoring is outsourced. Unless this can be done remotely, organizations incur huge costs for support engineers to visit their sites.
Due to the fact that there is no product available to cater for all these requirements, Venture Communications invested in a team to design and develop a product to fulfill these requirements and has the following features:
No Security Risk
The IntelliMon remote agent will not accept external connections from either the monitoring server or from any other device. It uses push technology to communicate. You therefore do not have to provide any external connectivity through your firewall to the agent and the IntelliMon System by no means jeopardizes your data integrity.
Easy Installation
The IntelliMon remote agent is pre-installed before it is shipped to a client. In most networks, the agent will require only power and a LAN cable. Once this is in place the agent will immediately fire away and start monitoring your devices. No special skills are required.
Easy Configuration
The IntelliMon remote agent downloads its configuration from the Monitoring server. Agents without any configuration can be installed onsite and will have the required configuration in 5 minutes, by downloading it from the IntelliMon server. This makes additions, deletions or placing devices on temporary maintenance an easy task.
Easy Upgrade
The IntelliMon remote agent will check for available product upgrades and will automatically upgrade itself when new versions are available. This provides an easy way to introduce new features or customized features for clients.
Easy Connectivity
The IntelliMon service uses the Internet for connectivity. All alerts and reports will be transported across the Internet. The Venture Communications monitoring server expects periodic communication checks from all agents. In the event of Internet outages, the server will generate alerts if updates are missed and clients will be informed that their Internet connection is disrupted leaving their site unmanaged during this period.
IntelliMon Architecture
Venture Communications have developed a system using the Internet to provide secure one-way monitoring. The IntelliMon service has four components:
· Remote Agent
· Monitoring Server
· Management reporting
· Venture Communications Service Desk
Remote Agent
The remote agent is a device installed on your LAN. This device poses no security threats to your organization as it is designed to perform nothing other than poling and service testing functionality. No connections can be made to this agent. It uses a pure push and pull technology to send alerts and receive new configurations.
It is equipped to poll devices using ICMP or it can test your service availability by establishing a socket connection to your server service and gracefully terminating the connection after successful establishment. Common services include SMTP, POP3, HTTP, HTTPS, FTP and SQL to mention a few. Non-standard ports can also be monitored. The time the agent waits for the connection is logged into a database to provide reports on response times or to identify over utilization during certain periods of the day. In the event of a Poll or service failure, this agent will communicate with the 24/7 support center of Venture Communications whereby the service desk agent will telephonically inform the support engineer of the problem. If the failure occurs after hours, this feature will allow the support engineer to resolve the failure before the start of business.
Device status and response times are displayed on the remote agent, so that the local support staff can also monitor devices proactively.
Monitoring Server
The monitoring server will publish real time device status, which can be viewed from anywhere on the internet by managers and administrators. This web page will also include available reports, which can be downloaded, when required.
The Monitoring server aggregates all alerts and reports from all the agents. When alerts are received from the agents, the alert is sorted on a priority basis:
Priority 1
Devices subscribed under this priority level will enjoy 24/7 telephonic information during device failures, automated mail notifications during device failures, detailed reporting, customer monitoring feature on the remote agent and dynamic web site.
Priority 2
Devices subscribed under this priority level will enjoy automated mail notifications during device failures, detailed reporting, customer monitoring feature on the remote agent and dynamic web site.
Priority 3
Devices subscribed under this priority level will enjoy detailed reporting, customer monitoring feature on the remote agent and dynamic web site.
The monitoring server will send daily monitoring summary reports and weekly summary reports. More detailed reports for specific devices can be downloaded from a secure web page dedicated to each subscriber.
Management Reporting
Management reports will be emailed to managers and support staff on a daily basis, which will include daily summarised reports for all monitored devices and weekly summarised reports of monitored devices, indicating overall availability.
Detailed statistics and availability for specific devices can be downloaded from a web page dedicated to each client. This report includes percentage availability and provides performance statistics indicating response time logged during every 24 hours, indicating response degradation during specific hours of the day. This analysis could be used to determine periods of network/device congestion and may be used to predict future network and server upgrade requirements.
