About Castle Rock

SNMPc 7.0 from Castle Rock Computing delivers a secure high availability network monitoring solution for Enterprise and SMB customers

New release supports live/standby backup servers for reliable, 24/7 network monitoring and management. User Audit Trails deliver accountability and intrusion detection.

Saratoga, CA, June 7th, 2004

Communication networks are an indispensable part of modern enterprises. Employee and customer interaction, technical support, marketing, sales and procurement activities are all highly dependent on an efficient and reliable network infrastructure. With this increasing reliance on data communications, the monitoring of the network infrastructure has become more important than ever.

To ensure a reliable 24/7 network monitoring solution SNMPc 7.0 introduces support for live/standby management servers. An automatic failover process includes the reconfiguration of any distributed polling agents in the network. Through the new standby server feature users can continue to monitor their network if the primary system is disabled through system failure, human error or other unforeseen circumstances.

SNMPc 7.0 also delivers improved security and accountability through support for user audit trails. Any user access to the management platform or configuration changes are tracked and written to a log file. Alerts are automatically generated if an intrusion attempt is detected.

“SNMPc 7.0 delivers on our commitment to offer cost-effective, secure and highly reliable solutions for monitoring today’s mission critical networksĂ®, said Castle Rock Computing, VP Sales, John Maytum. ìMore than 100,000 network managers rely on SNMPc to deliver proactive network monitoring and management. With the introduction of a redundant backup server and user audit trails, SNMPc 7.0 is an integral part of a secure enterprise disaster recovery plan.”

SNMPc 7.0 also introduces a number of new features designed to enhance application monitoring and the management of alerts from network devices.

Application Service Polling

In SNMPc 7.0 customers can now poll any TCP application port and monitor the health of an application though a unique send and reply string. As an example this will allow SNMPc to monitor a Web server and ensure that the page is displayed successfully. It will also allow SNMPc to monitor the health of a database by issuing SQL queries or monitor non SNMP devices via Telnet.

“Quick” Event Filters

Management Stations which can not process alerts effectively can deliver confusing or misleading information. This can increase the Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) for network issues. SNMPc 7.0 addresses this issue by introducing a new simplified alert filtering system. When an alert is received users can quickly direct SNMPc to create a filter to recognize and respond to that alert in the future.

“One of SNMPc’s great strengths is its ability to receive and process SNMP alerts from any device and from any vendor”, explained Sean Wachob, VP Engineering. “In SNMPc 7.0 we have incorporated a quick filter feature so that when an alert is received the user can instantly configure SNMPc to recognize that alert in the future and take the appropriate action. This leads to improved system implementation time and reduced ongoing system maintenance.”

Price and availability

SNMPc Enterprise is the base system for a distributed multi user management system and is available for a US list price of $2950.

SNMPc Workgroup is a single user version for managing small to medium networks and is available for a U.S. list price of $995.

Customer shipments will begin June 14th, 2004. Free upgrades to SNMPc 7.0 are available to anyone with a valid maintenance policy. A free 30-day evaluation version of SNMPc 7.0 is available from www.castlerock.com.