Automating auditing tasks with ENT Network Monitor

You may have noticed frequent mention in this document of ENT Network Monitor. However, up until this point, we haven't really described ENT Network Monitor in any great detail, other than pointing out that ENT Network Monitor is a network auditing agent (like ENT NetCenter).

So what is the difference between ENT Network Monitor and ENT NetCenter then and why would you use one or the other? In short, the answer is automation.

ENT NetCenter is a fully featured graphical user interface that is designed to be used by your IT Helpdesk and Network staff to audit and manage the IT assets on the networks that you manage on demand. ENT Network Monitor, on the other hand, is a Windows NT Service – so typically it's running in the background and doesn't have any user interface. It's designed with one sole purpose and that is to automate auditing of the networks and machines that you manage.

Since ENT Network Monitor runs as a Windows NT service, no one actually has to be logged into the machine where it's installed for it to be able to do its job. ENT Network Monitor can be configured to audit your network at regular intervals – you can also configure it to monitor one of the directories on your network file system for audit snapshot files… if it finds new snapshot files in that directory, it will post these to your Enterprise Server automatically and then delete them.

So if you install ENT Network Monitor on one of your servers (or any machine that you rarely or never shut down) you have the equivalent of three full time network technicians working in 8 hour shifts, 24 hours a day, constantly monitoring the network and alerting IT Staff and/or managers of any faults or changes that they discover.

In many respects, ENT Network Monitor is actually better than a technician, since it never gets bored of performing these fairly mundane tasks. This means that you can configure ENT Network Monitor to audit the network and check for snapshot files much more often and regularly than your IT technicians could stomach – and ENT Network Monitor costs a lot less than you'd pay a single technician for even a month's work, let alone 24 hour shifts, seven days a week, year after year.

Basically, ENT Network Monitor is about efficiency – it can be used to automate chores and free up expensive, highly trained IT Staff to work on the things that they really should be working on – such as helping users, dealing with any problems that your tireless ENT Network Monitors discover or planning and expanding network infrastructure.