HMS has four parts: management console, Web interface, agent and solutions studio. The management console is a standalone application, a place for the system administration of HMS. The Web interface, however, is where most of HMS's day-to-day management takes place. With the exception of remote installation, batch processing of reports and group management, the Web interface can handle any task related to the HMS system. The agent resides on monitored machines and reports information back to the Heroix server. The solutions studio creates custom monitoring solutions. If you can look past the awkward user-interface of the management console, you will enjoy HMS's ease of use and extensive features.

Installing and Using HMS

I installed HMS on a dual Pentium 600-MHz box with 512 MB of RAM at Network Computing's Real-World Labs at Syracuse University. After installing the solutions studio, management console, Web interface and agent, I was ready to deploy the HMS agent to other servers. HMS allows the remote installation of the agent through the management console, a nice feature. Agents can be deployed to other machines in your trusted domain or workgroup by providing domain name and administrator-level credentials of the target system. HMS then will deploy the agent and scan for programs to monitor. The agent does leave a big footprint--a 50-MB storage footprint and 38 MB of memory--but uses only one percent of CPU resources on each client.

You would think that doing a remote install of the agent would mean you want to monitor that machine, but you must also add the machine's name in the "managed computers" section of the management suite or Web interface. Once the server is in the management list, HMS is able to correctly identify common existing solutions that are running, such as IIS, Terminal Services, Active Directory and Windows Server.

Customizing predefined sensors or solutions is easy with HMS. I wanted to monitor our MS SQL 2000 Server running on our Solarwinds box. Because the MS SQL server was detected as running, the only configuration I had to change was when to schedule the sensors to check different facets of SQL server and the threshold under which to fire an SNMP alert. HMS has a wealth of options for sensor scheduling. Individual sensors can be set to check their part of the solution over a repeated interval, at certain time of the day, on certain days of the week/month and even months of the year.

Using the Web interface, raised alerts can be viewed in a detailed list or a simple graphic that represents the server with number of alerts raised. Alerts also can be color-coded to signify the severity of the error. After setting the threshold for database growth of our Solarwinds server and the server memory, I quickly noticed that our instance of SQL server was using 100 percent of the memory available to it. When viewing the error, there are options to acknowledge, hide or add text and update the error for other administrators to view. For our error, HMS provided a definition of the error, performance statistics and even potential solutions to fix the problem on the server. This proves quite useful for administrators who might not be well versed in fixing potential disastrous problems with different software packages. Fixing our SQL server memory problem left our Solarwinds box running more efficiently, all because of HMS.

Reporting Features

Good • Ability to monitor numerous platforms • Solution Studio offers customized solutions fit for any computing situation Bad • Management console's UI is difficult to navigate eQ Management Suite; Heroix Corp Price: Heroix eQ is priced per managed node with base server monitoring starting at $595 per server. 800-229-6500, 617-527-1550 www.heroix.com

HMS reporting features are very extensive and intuitive. The management console has three categories of reports designed for the organization's different IT roles--CIO, management and systems administrator. Each role has a different subset of reports pertinent to that job title available for viewing. For example, the CIO reports are high-level views of the entire system, such as free disk space of every machine, overall CPU usage and storage information. Whereas system administrators' reports are more technical in nature, covering such items as SQL Server 2000 CPU usage.

Reports can be exported to numerous formats, including HTML, CSV (comma separated), Crystal Reports, Excel, RTF, text or Word for Windows. I set several reports--free disk space and overall CPU utilization--from each of the three groups to be batch processed as HTML files and was impressed with the clarity and wealth of information provided. Reports can be batch processed hourly, monthly, nightly or in weekly time frames. The reports give you a lot of information. But if you're monitoring a lot of servers, the detailed reports can be very lengthy.

Solutions Studio

The Solutions Studio (SS) allows administrators to either create new or tweak existing solutions. Editing an existing solution is very straightforward. On the other hand, creating a new solution to fit your organization's specific needs can be time consuming and daunting. With the number of sensors and solutions predefined, it would take a very specialized computing scenario to merit the creation of a new solution or sensor--a testament to the extensive options that HMS and the SS have predefined.

System administrators should take note of HMS and relish the fact that one application can perform all application and server monitoring within their organization. The Web interface's ease of use and the ability to create new solutions from the SS also should direct system administrators' attention to HMS. In the future, it would be nice if HMS ditched its management console and moved completely to the Web interface.

Andy Woods is a computer scientist for a federal law enforcement agency. You can reach him by e-mail at awoods@nwc.com.