It's 2 a.m. Are Your Servers Up?
By Stephanos Gosling
Administrators today are under a lot of
pressure. Downtime and outage are deemed unacceptable, but they happen anyway. And when they do, you need to know quicklyıpreferably before you get a raft of calls and emails from angry users. Definitely before the managers who control purse strings become irate.
Alchemy Eye is software built for just this purpose: to warn administrators of impending strife. The software can be configured to quiz your servers in several ways to check their availability, then notify you if it detects a problem. Alchemy Eye is based mostly at the TCP/IP layer of network communications, so it's cross platform with respect to the systems it can monitor. It does, however, offer some added functionality for Windows NT and 2000 platforms.
Alchemy Eye is available for free trial use (crippled, of course) and also for purchase from Alchemy-Lab's Web site. It should run on all Win32 platforms. At $50, it's not exactly going to break the bank, but with the low price tag comes a rather limited feature set. The package itself is small and installs fully in less than a minute.
The program comes up very quickly and you're presented with the main screen as it's shown in
