Catalog network computers and monitor their state.
Watcher is Windows application that helps you catalog network computers and monitor their state. It supports various notifications--desktop message, net send, mail when something happens, provides you with possibility to send Wake-On-LAN signal to some computer. You can use it also as a simple catalog of your network. All data about machines is stored in XML file. It allows to manually add one computer or automatically scan some network segment, organize computers in groups, import data from other people, various notifications when some computer go online or offline.
it does not add much to the good old DOS command testing
Summary
This is a nice start
Steaphany
Pros
For a pre 1.0 release this is not bad. It's not CA-Unicenter TNG, but there is no massive over head nor is the install complex. Just unzip the down load file and run, that's it.
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<p>One feature that I found useful is that you can add frequestly access/relied upon hosts, off the LAN and on the Interner, into the list so that they can also be monitored.
Cons
I am using version 0.5. If a later version becomes available, some of these issues may have been addressed.
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<p>The network scan / discovery is not in the most obvious place in the menus. You need to click Edit, Mass Add... to bring up the discovery window.
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<p>On the Settings window, Monitor tab, the poll interval is limited to no longer than 100 seconds. Being use to CA-Unicenter, I manually entered 300 seconds and it was accepted with no warnings or errors. I am not sure if the 300 second polling interval was actually being used or if it defaulted to another value. Another surprise is the buttons to increase and decrease the poll interval are backwards, the top one decreases the time and the bottom increases it.
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<p>When trying to sort the node list my the column headers, I once had Watcher die and it sent off an error report.
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<p>When the host list needs to be scrolled, there is no way to resize the window to see all hosts at one glance.
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<p>I also was able to inadvertently add two hosts with the same name string, with out any errors.