Testimonial

Since 2003, network administrators at a Fortune 500 company have used PingerThinger to monitor over 850 IPs. Read what one of them has to say:

We use PingerThinger in our Network Operations Center to monitor over 750 routers and switches in our corporate network. We accomplish this by pinging about 960 different IP addresses. This allows us to know the status of all our routers, switches, and Lan/Wan links. Our fortune 500 company used to rely on a large and expensive GUI based network monitoring system. When a device went down an icon went red. Then you always had to click several levels down in the maps just to see what was down. With PingerThinger we project the ‘Live Red List’ on a large screen at the front of the room. Since this is a dynamically updated screen everyone can see in plain English what device or site is down at that moment. This has dramatically improved our ability to respond to outages fast. We also use the comment field displayed in the ‘Live Red List’ to great advantage. This is where we list the location of the device. So instead of just a router name showing as down the list will show ‘Headquarters core router’ as down. Another great feature built into PingerThinger is the ability to send the log to the serial port. We connect the serial port to a signboard system that scrolls through all our transmission network alarms. This allows us to see transmission system alarms and network alarms on a single display.

The PingerThinger program makes it very easy to modify the list of devices being pinged. Using an editor you enter the devices you want to ping in a text file, then restart the program. If you want to stop monitoring a device for a few days you just put a # at the start of that devices line in the text file and restart the program. Any person in the group can update the database with only a couple of minutes of training.

Logs files are also very easy to use. If there is any question about what happened during the night or with an earlier outage all you have to do is click on ‘show log’ from the tool bar. This is a text file and shows when the device outage began, when it recovered and how long it was down.

A great application for this program is to use it for trouble shooting intermittent server problems. I keep a second copy of the program on my desktop. If a server is having problems I have the second PingerThinger ping the server once every second. I can go home for the night and review the log in the morning and tell just when the server dropped off line. I have found it a great way to tell when load balancing ports are failing.

This program gives us everything we need in a network monitor system, it tells us what is down, it is easy to use, it provides plain text file logs, and is very economical to buy. I strongly recommend it!

Bruce
Network Analyst