SpectorSoft Introduces New Server and Application Monitoring Solution for Small to Mid-Sized Enterprises

VERO BEACH, FL--(Marketwired - Feb 10, 2015) - SpectorSoft, a leader in the user activity monitoring and analysis market, today introduced Free Server & Application Monitor, a new server and application monitoring (SAM) solution for small to mid-sized enterprises. This free software enables organizations to monitor mail, web and FTP servers; server health; and database availability; and offers a wide variety of monitoring services not found in traditional SAM solutions.

"IT teams at small to mid-sized organizations are continually tasked to do more with less. They require enhanced visibility into the health of their networks, but they need to achieve it in a cost-effective manner that doesn't require allocating additional IT resources," said Phil Zamfino, director of product management for SpectorSoft. "Our Free Server & Application Monitor was designed to make IT lives easier. We've reduced complexity by automating server monitoring processes and making the software easy to install, configure and use."

Log management/server and disk monitoring budgets revealed
According to a January 2015 Redmond Media server-monitoring survey that polled more than 300 North American IT executives, when asked how much of their annual IT budget is related to Log Management/Server and Disk Monitoring software (new or renewed), 25 percent of those surveyed said they spend between $1,000 and $25,000, nine percent spend between $25,001 and $50,000, seven percent spend between $50,0001 and $200,000, and six percent spend more than $200,000. In addition to the significant investments they are making in log-management/server and disk-monitoring solutions, these IT executives are making personnel investments as well. When asked how much time their organization spends monitoring server/disk performance or uptime per year, 30 percent of the same survey respondents said between 12 and 60 hours, 12 percent said between 60 and 180 hours, four percent said between 192 and 360 hours, and nine percent said more than 360 hours per year.

Unlike competing free monitoring solutions that are cloud-based, require separate applications for specific feature sets or rely heavily on obtrusive advertising to supplement revenue, Free Server & Application Monitor is not advertising based, does not require any additional software purchases and does not open a network up to outside entities because the software is installed on hardware internal to the organization.

Server and application monitoring simplified
Free Server & Application Monitor communicates with the network infrastructure and related applications based on IT-defined scheduled intervals. When a potential outage or service disruption is detected, the software quickly notifies IT of the problem, enabling it to take action before users are adversely affected. The software includes the ability to monitor mail servers (SMTP, POP3 and IMAP), web servers (HTTP/HTTPS, SSL certificates and domain expiration), database availability (MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle and ODBC Data Sources), server health (CPU load, memory utilization and Windows services) and FTP servers [ICMP (Ping) remote hosts, TCP port response, DNS servers, NTP time server and NNTP news server].

Server downtime is still an issue…and an expensive one
Historically, IT has relied on user complaints to determine whether a server is down. When employees discover they are no longer receiving email, or a server-based application they are using suddenly becomes unresponsive, they typically call IT.

According to the Redmond survey, when IT executives were asked how frequently they experienced server downtime in the past year, 17 percent said more than a few times and four percent said more than a dozen times. When the same group was asked how long it was before they became aware of a server or application failure, roughly 13 percent said it was between 30 and 240 minutes, while another nine percent said they only became aware of the problem when someone else told them about it.

To compound matters, when a network server fails, costs pile up quickly. When asked what 30 minutes of downtime cost their company, 27 percent of the Redmond survey respondents said between $1,000 and $10,000, 12 percent said $10,0001 and $50,000, five percent said $50,001 and $100,000, four percent said $101,000 and $500,000, and six percent said over $500,000.

SpectorSoft's Free Server & Application Monitor offers 24/7/365 monitoring with alerts and notifications that bring server disruptions to the attention of IT before users do. Benefits include:

• Reduction or elimination of web server outages, which provides maximum availability for customers, clients and employees while accessing company resources

• Reduction or elimination of mail server outages, which ensures critical communications are not delayed or missed entirely

• Reduction or elimination of application, database and general file-server interruptions, which ensures access to critical services

• Server health information tracking, which helps IT staff prevent server failures rather than react to them

Additional features include:

• The ability to monitor servers and the network applications they run

• Support for multiple types of alerts, notifications and actions

• The ability to store monitor results to SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle or a file

• The ability to automatically publish network status to an Intranet website

• Support for hierarchical/dependency rules and schedules

• Automatic failure clearing so priority alerts can be sent

• Automatic monitor stop during server maintenance

Availability
Free Server & Application Monitor is available now. For more information and capabilities of the software, please visit http://www.spectorsoft.com/work-solutions.html

About SpectorSoft
SpectorSoft is the leader in computer and network user activity monitoring and analysis software. SpectorSoft has helped more than 36,000 businesses, government organizations, schools and law enforcement agencies improve how they address security and achieve compliance across communication and computing OSs and devices. SpectorSoft solutions review security risk, audit compliance mandates, protect assets and reputation, ensure adherence to acceptable use policies and optimize productivity and efficiency. For more information, visit www.spectorsoft.com.