SeNTry: The Enterprise Event Manager
Mission Critical Software Inc.’s SeNTry Enterprise event manager consolidates and improves the event-reporting capabilities of a Windows NT system in much the same way that the company’s Enterprise Administrator enhances and expands the system's capabilities in the areas of security administration and delegation of authority.
SeNTry, designed to work with Enterprise Administrator, helps IT centralize all of the system reporting functions, allowing many Windows NT servers to report event logs, application event logs, SNMP traps, performance counters and other information to one location. The tool filters the resulting flood of information to only those items deemed relevant, and then e-mails the data to those who need to know. There can be multiple filter sets and multiple recipients established so those in the best position to act receive only the alerts and warnings that matter.
SeNTry is installed simply, and includes the ODBC 3.5 components needed for database connectivity if needed. A runtime version of Microsoft Access is also included, which allows the reporting functions to operate on workstations that do not have Access installed. The install process can be run from a Gatherer machine, a Sender machine, or both so additionally monitored servers need only support minimal storage and service loading. There is also the obligatory Web-based event monitor for easy querying and monitoring from any browser.
Once installed, one or more of the 30 or so Knowledge Packs can be used as starting points for report configuration. These packs contain report templates for many widely used enterprise software products, facilitating the implementation of SeNTry. Without this helping hand, a new user would face the daunting prospect of creating informative and coherent reports from scratch.
SeNTry does a wonderful job of shoring up Windows NT when it is used in multiple-server environments. In these large installations the native reporting capabilities of the operating system are simply inadequate, or at best labor intensive, for the task of keeping administrators informed about problems and errors.