IPHost Network Monitor Free Edition

IPHost Network Monitor Free is a professional software application that is able to monitor both Windows and Unix-based networks, and send smart notifications upon various events. It provides support for more than 20 monitoring methods and different types of alerting modes.

The tool can be controlled directly from your desktop or via your web browser. The web-driven interface can be activated via the classical GUI with just one click and used for checking out the status of your system with the aid of a Dashboard, as well as working with reports and alerts.

The classical GUI gives you the possibility to filter the network monitoring events by host, monitoring mode, current state, discovered networks or favorite items. It offers you full control for starting, stopping and configuring network monitoring options.

The Windows interface is made up of several dockable panels which can be arranged in the preferred order. You can check out a tree view with all available networks, property editor which allows you to tweak the monitoring mode, report pane and log display. System tray notifications are also revealed upon important events.

IPHost Network Monitor Free offers step-by-step guidance throughout the process of network discovery. You may opt for an automatic discovery mode of network resources (default settings are applied), advanced setup where you can alter the default settings, or a custom monitoring task that allows you tweak the host or host group.

As soon as the utility identifies the target network resources, it gives you the possibility to configure email account settings in order to send and receive alerts and reports via email. You can also perform a test in order to verify the email delivery.

The application lets you work with different monitoring modes, such as send a standard ping command to the server/device, check a POP3, IMAP and SMTP server with optional authentication, and verify an FTP server, current CPU load on a remote computer via WMI, inbound and outbound throughput on remote system, as well as ODBC data source and MySQL database for availability.

If the preset monitoring profiles don’t cover your needs, you may create custom ones using scripts and Nagios plugins. Plus, you can alter each monitoring mode by changing its name, comment, polling frequency and other parameters related to timeout, performance level settings and action performed upon state changes.

You may also work with several admin tools, such as remote desktop, SSH and Telnet client. Other smart monitoring features help you carry out polling tasks and set the dependence of monitor checks on the state of another monitor.

IPHost Network Monitor Free uses clever alerting options in order to send emails, show popup notifications, make use of ‘Net Send’ commands for sending message on a remote machine, execute a program, send Jabber, ICQ and AOL messages, play sound, set SNMP value, and execute script over SSH. You may set up alerting rules and schedule them.

The application is able to generate reports for a group, host, monitor type or the whole system, and allows you to check out a summary report for a monitoring event and view performance graphs. Reports may be scheduled and sent via email.

IPHost Network Monitor Free provides support for monitoring features, network discovery, alerting options, reports, web-driven layout and Windows GUI. Plus, it manages to successfully integrate all the features into an intuitive environment, making its monitoring capabilities available for rookies and professionals alike.

The free edition is fully functional but the number of simultaneously monitored resources is limited to 40, only one Web Transaction Monitor can be used, and SMS and GSM modem add-on is disabled. To remove these limitations you can use the basic edition of the program which comes with support for up to 100 monitoring connections.