ipMonitor Wishlist

Here's my small wishlist for SP2 or 9.0.2 :-)

1. When navigating to monitor properties from search results screen and then saving it, is it possible to postback to search results? Currently postback brings me to "My Network" and I have to click "Last results" again to move on to the next monitor on my list.
2. Is it possible to persist column settings (selected columns and their widths) not only for the current session, but forever, ie. save user preferences?
3. Columns are not resizable in the alerts list. Alert names in our configuration do not fit in the current column width and the only way to see full alert name is to go to alert details.
4. It would really be nice to be able to sort by particular column. Currently none of the grids offers sorting.
5. The downtime simulator is a very nice tool, but it would be even nicer if it had the "Test Start time" in addition to "Downtime Start time". This would allow to see the actual simulation for the "Up" time period as well, and not only Warn->Down->Lost. E.g. If the monitor goes down in a minute, how soon alerts will be sent? In order to tell that, you must review current "Up" test delay and add it to the value shown in the the simulator.
6. When the bandwidth monitor's threshold is exceeded, monitors availability goes down! I realize this is a common feature for all the monitors, but really looks confusing in the reports. Availability should go down only when ipMonitor cannot read the data, shouldn't it? Same for drive space, etc...
7. Wouldn't it be cool to have the ability to specify different Alert Subject/Text for Failures/Recovery of different types of monitors? This is a little related to item #6 above. It would also be great to be able to override alert text on a particular monitor's level.
8. Wouldn't it be cool to have a grid in monitor's report that would display events that triggered alerts? E.g. eventlog monitor: a table in a report that shows eventlog entries that triggered alerts for this monitor...
9. Any progress on GSM SMS alerting fix for 160 characters issue?
10. Any progress on ipMonitor being able to work with SNMPv2 traps?
11. Any progress on the idea about having an "email monitor" that I have mentioned before?

Thank you!

 Hi there

One I'd like to add.

Direct monitoring of items available in Windows perfmon such as page file useage, would be great to havemore grnularioty on these items and be able to report on them. 

Hi Chris, I see what you mean regarding adding the exchange monitor, but it can't give me reports on disk IO's or page file useage, if this could be added in a futerure release it would really help as i benchmark lots of our companies servers and this is a monitor that would be really useful. If I was to contact support is there anyway I can monitor disk IO's and page file useage through WMI or similar and report on them?

Some more for the wishlist:

 
Control over the monitors template - i.e. set all furture bandwidth monitor with thresholds for Gbit NIC's and switches so not to so them all after the event or manually.

Useage of Mass edit - make more friendly and granular.  I tried to change the settings on all bandwidth monitors and ended up changing them all in 2 areas (max threshold and max short term)

Thanks, Andy 

Additions to my the wishlist :-)

• If a monitor or a group of monitors is manually suspended, there is no indication about who did it and for how long. IMO it is crucial to have this info in a multi-user environment.
• I saw some marketing for new BB4 recently and they have "world clocks" feature on top of screens. I think it would be nice to be able to put clocks in various timezones to be displayed in ipMonitor page headers.

BTSpaul:

08 Apr 2008:

9. Any progress on GSM SMS alerting fix for 160 characters issue?
10. Any progress on ipMonitor being able to work with SNMPv2 traps?

I've been asking about the two items above since October 2007 (both here in Thwack and in support tickets)... Every time Solarwinds would acknowledge this as an existing problem that needs attention. May I ask again if there is any progress/workaround/fixes?

Thank you!

Any updates, please?

Thank you!

More requests:

• <I moved this one to the top>  If a monitor fails and then is disabled or suspended, when it enables, it should send an up alert.  We haven't found a good method to notify the secondary, hardware, and manager contacts for monitors when the primary person starts troubleshooting a problem.  If I have a down email or text message, I'd like to get an up message, but I don't if the monitor is disabled or suspended.
• Alert on "noisy" monitors.  I had a server that dropped off the network every few minutes for a few weeks before we found the problem.  I looked in the IpMonitor logs and saw that it had gone into warning mode several thousand times, never once failed.  If there are so many failures per hour, send an alert.
• External monitoring of my IpMonitor installation.  I'd like Solar Winds to monitor my IpMonitor and send an alert when I drop off the network.  We have monitors on everything:  SAN, UPS, Generator, Power to the building, Switches, Servers, etc.  If my company drops off the internet, I never learn about it.
• Be able to report on the link between the monitors and alerts.  I use custom tags and smart groups, and have smart groups set up to look for improperly created monitors; I send out a monthly configuration report to show improper monitors.  However, every once in a while we create a monitor that isn't being watched for alerts.  Putting some of the "relationship" information into a report would be great.
• Accounts / passwords tied to domain accounts.

IpMonitor is still the best $800.00 I've spent in IT.

Thanks, Richard

Could Solarwinds please confirm that request #2113 (see details here) will be implemented in the next build of ipMonitor?

There are many situations when email notifications is the only way to get informed about problems (RAID card management software, SQL jobs, DNS failovers, etc). Ideally we see ipMonitor as a central monitoring and alerting solution in our network. It would be great to direct all those 3rd party email notifications to ipMonitor and have it trigger alerts (email/sms/etc).

Thank you!

I guess I would expect to be able to create monitors that would watch for incoming mail and parse the From, To, Subject fields (and maybe Body too) and based on parse results, trigger an alert. Similar to EventLog monitor, but monitor ipMonitor mailbox instead... Certainly, this needs to have a content generator which would allow me to grab the info I need from the email to include in the ipMonitor alert (email/sms).

If the rule configuration would allow counting accumulated stuff it would be awesome too, but the basic functionality as described above is something we are desperate to have.

Thank you!

I have some:

1. Normally when you put a recovery parameter is to restart a Windows NT service. But what if the recovery isn't restarting a Windows NT service but several services or you have to put some commands in DOS prompt. Can there be a recovery based on a batch program and/or can there be a modification so you can restart several services?

 2. We use the ipMonitor for telco clients. We wish to monitor RTP, SS7, R2, etc. Can you include some other types of monitors that can do this?

Regards

Alejandro Castro

Sixbell Nekotec Solutions