Mobile and Wireless
Research in Motion's BlackBerry has become crucial for enterprises, so it's no
surprise that troubleshooting and resolving BlackBerry problems is an important and time-consuming job for IT administrators. Several vendors now offer
BlackBerry monitoring and management solutions, but BoxTone for BlackBerry is
one-of-a-kind because it monitors
every single email message sent
to a user's BlackBerry and collects
data about the flow of messages to
these devices, allowing companies
to be proactive about resolving
BlackBerry problems.
Chesapeake Energy in Oklahoma City began looking into BlackBerry management products after several instances in which high-level personnel had to wait two or three hours for BlackBerry service. "We were completely reactive, so if anyone was having issues we only knew if they called the Help desk," says Chris Cox, Chesapeake Energy's supervisor of IT operations. Because email is Chesapeake Energy's primary form of communication, it was imperative that the company's employees have BlackBerry service at
all times.
After evaluating several products—and having the company's wireless provider
offer its recommendation—the company decided to purchase BoxTone for BlackBerry because Chesapeake Energy considered it to be the most mature product in the BlackBerry monitoring and management market. The product's ability to
integrate with enterprise management products was one of the deciding factors in
Chesapeake Energy's decision to purchase BoxTone for BlackBerry. Chesapeake
Energy had been using BoxTone for BlackBerry for three months at the time of
this writing, and although the company's Help desk was still receiving just as
many BlackBerry tickets as before, IT administrators weren't spending nearly as
much time resolving BlackBerry problems. Scott Banks, an administrative services
supervisor for Chesapeake Energy, estimates that since the company started using
BoxTone for BlackBerry, its IT administrators are saving at least one hour per Help
desk ticket because the product troubleshoots BlackBerry problems for them.
"[Before implementing BoxTone for Blackberry] we were using upwards of 30 percent of our time just tracking down BlackBerry problems," says Cox.
—Megan Bearly
Networking
The network-management marketplace
is flooded with products that claim to help you better oversee your network
infrastructure and environment. I talk to
vendors around the world, and each one
seems to offer a unique answer to that
age-old IT administrator plea: How can
your product make my life easier?
One network-monitoring product that
has really stood out from its competitors over the past year is NETIKUS.NET's
EventSentry 2.72, a proactive, real-time
solution that watches over your servers, workstations, and network devices.
EventSentry's primary components—event
log monitoring, system health monitoring,
basic network monitoring—might seem
standard parts of a typical monitoring solution, but NETIKUS.NET goes further to
provide open-source flexibility (e.g., withits multiple database options), environment monitoring (e.g., motion, water, smoke),
and even a downscaled freeware version
(EventSentry Lite).
To get a feel for EventSentry in action, I contacted Ron Pugh, senior network
engineer at Prosper Marketplace. Pugh
heads up an environment of about 50
servers running Windows Server 2003.
Ron had been on the lookout for just the
right network-monitoring tool and found
it in EventSentry. "I needed to consolidate
my Windows event logs for monitoring,
archiving, and reporting," he said. "The
ability to monitor event logs for different
levels of error messages, types of error
messages, and the message text within
those error messages is my favorite and
most useful feature. And the ability to
direct any of those messages to be written
to database or sent to my email/pager is
most important. I also wanted a place to
store performance counters so that I could
report on those."
When I met NETIKUS.NET founder
Ingmar Koecher last year, he struck me as
a modest guy who's really invested in the
happiness of his customers. And it's easy
to see why. Koecher started out as a systems administrator himself, and his mission
in creating EventSentry was to create an
affordable, easy-to-use product that IT
administrators actually enjoy using. "What
makes our product unique is the way it
bridges the gap between open-source and
expensive commercial solutions," Koecher
told me. Ron backs up the impression of Koecher's company as customer-oriented: "The customer support is extremely
responsive. They've provided me any fixes
I need in a timely manner."
Ron's relationship with NETIKUS.NET
involves give-and-take. "The company has
implemented a lot of EventSentry improvements on my request—for example, file/
directory monitoring and performance-counter logging. However, I would like to
see more drag-and-drop capabilities in the
administration UI." Sounds like Ron has
another request to put in—and you can bet
NETIKUS will listen.
—Jason Bovberg
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