Quest Spotlight on Web Servers 3

Gather remote systems stats without agents

by Brian Wilson

New Architect
March 2003

Quest’s Spotlight on Web Servers is supposedly able to “diagnose and resolve every component affecting Web performance.” Its rather ambitious goals are to enable monitoring without requiring any agent software on the remote hosts, and to monitor hosts running different operating systems and Web servers. But don’t be fooled: It’s not really a diagnostic tool, and achieves the monitoring goals only with serious security compromises.

Spotlight runs as a Windows 2000 or NT application but allows Web servers on both Windows and Unix platforms to be monitored. Installing it is the usual slide through InstallShield—click, click, and you’re up and running. I tried it on Windows 2000. For target hosts, I pointed it at several Red Hat 7.x servers with Apache 1.3, a Windows 2000 server running IIS 4.0, and one running Apache 1.3.

At a Glance
	Spotlight on Web Servers 3
Rating
Company	Quest Software
URL	www.quest.com
Price	$995 on CD, $945 download, includes a year of support.<>