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If you want to monitor your network then I gotta share with you one simply great product. That product is Servers Alive. First, let me say, I have no affiliation with the manufacturer other than being a customer. And, I just happened to stumble on this product about 3 months ago. What does Servers Alive do? It will monitor many devices and events on your network. I know, you'll say, there are many products such as HP Open View, etc. that will do this. And, I've tried many of them. The thing about Servers Alive (SA) is that it's simple and focused on one task. Many of the other products are very complex and try to do too many things such as creating graphical maps of your network. With SA you can literally install it and be monitoring devices on your network within 5 minutes. I do a simple Ping to see if the routers in our retail stores are responding. However, there are dozens of checks you can do such as determining if a service is running on a Win 2k server, you can check for available disk space, you can check a web page, etc. The number of checks you can make is very thorough. If a device fails, you can then alert the appropriate personnel. The number of alerts is also plentiful. You can send an email, send a page, send an alpha page, call a program, start a service, etc. You can escalate the alerts to different personnel based upon how long a device is down. You can also tell it not to alert until a device has failed for x number of cycles to avoid false alerts or devices that are busy. I set this to 3 cycles so that a device must be down 3 consecutive cycles before an email is generated. The program will also collect statistics for you to use in a database or program of your own. On top of it all, it can produce a generic web page showing the status of the devices. Or you can create your own template that SA uses to create the web page every cycle. The best part? This program is only $90! If you only have 5 devices to monitor it's free! The shareware version will monitor 5 devices, you'll need to pay to do more. The full version will monitor 1,000 devices or services. Highly recommended. You can check it out at http://www.woodstone.nu/salive/. chuck Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of my employer, except in this case.