I couldn't help noticing the offer for a "FREE Monitoring Tool Inside" on the cover of this week's issue of "Windows IT Pro" magazine, a Penton publication. Unfortunately, a cursory glance at the contents showed me that this FREE solution was more of a curiosity than a really useful tool.
Why a "curiosity"? Because it is assembled from a number of open systems tools, and that's a good thing.
What would make it a "really useful tool"? The ability to function as an agent on the server on a 24x7 basis. What this tool offers, as do so many other partial solutions, is a central poller facility rather than a locally deployed agent. I know many IT shops that have developed their own monitoring tools to run as an agent service simply by conversion of their programs into a Windows service. Without the ability to run on the local agent, you can't alert when there are network problems, and you can't remediate the problems until the network is back up.
If you're a small shop seriously looking to implement a monitoring solution with as few pesos as possible, consider JFFNMS only as a curiosity.
Refer to www.JMACINC.com for the rest of the story.
