As one of the resident tech guys at N-able, I thought it would be cool to offer up some good dirt on N-central 7.0 that would ultimately make your job as the MSP easier. For example, did you know that N-central 7.0 comes standard with more than 150 built-in monitoring services? And there are lots more available on the N-able Resource Center. Some services, like the ‘Windows Event Log’ service, are used by everyone. Others are also extremely valuable, but not everyone knows what they do or when to use them. In this series of blog entries, I’m going to cover some of N-central’s relatively-unknown gems.
For this first blog, I’d like to introduce you to the Interface Health service. This dapper young service not only looks good and comes from a good home, but isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty when the time arises. Intrigued yet? By day, this service holds an average day job; by night – he turns into a network monitoring super-hero!
Every one of N-central’s monitoring services answers a question for you; in the case of the Interface Health service, it answers the question ‘Is anything bad happening on a NIC or port?’ The Interface Health service uses SNMP to figure out the following juicy tidbits of information:
- if an Ethernet cable has become unplugged
- if a port on a switch/router/NIC has been turned off
- if the port is dropping any packets
- if any of the TCP/IP packets that the port is handing have errors
This is a fantastic service to use on all of your customers’ networking gear (firewalls, switches, routers, VoIP devices, etc…), as well as any of their mission-critical servers (Exchange servers, Domain Controllers, IIS servers). The Interface Health service is also very handy in a pre-sales environment; imagine walking into a prospect’s environment and being able to tell them right away that they need a new network cable on port 35 of their switch!
Well, that’s all for this blog – go check out the Interface Health service right away – you’ll be quite pleased! And please stay tuned as there will be more of these posts every few days!
Chris Reid