Cisco VOIP Call Manager Call Tracker

Are you running a Cisco Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) telephony system?

Is it running on a Windows 2000 Server?

Do you want to see who has made/recieved what calls, at what time and for how long?

Well, you have two options. Option 1 is to go and purchase an e-billing add-on for your VOIP system (ringmaster, etc) which will give more information than you require, and at a price that will make your Finance department heads spin. Or option 2, you can purchase the ‘Call Tracker’ application at a fraction of the cost.

How does it work....

The ‘Call Tracker’ application works on the basis that the Cisco Trace Analysis module is operational on your VOIP system. This module creates detailed log files as calls are being made and received on your system. However, the format of the information in the log files is such, that data extrapolation for the purpose of reporting is not an easy task. Secondly, the log files are not permanently stored and therefore call logs are maintained for only a very short period.

What the ‘Call Tracker’ application does is to monitor the log files as they are being created, edited and deleted. As the log files are changing the program extracts all the necessary elements which define the complete nature of the call , i.e.

• Start time of call
• Start date of call
• Caller’s telephone number
• Caller’s name (if call made internally)
• Destination number
• End time
• End date
• Duration in seconds

This information is then stored in a Microsoft Access database (one record per call) which the user can then report on using either Microsoft Access itself, or through any mechanism that can attach to Access files (i.e. ODBC, Excel, etc.)

**NEW** Access Database now includes many built-in reports **NEW**

Cost....only 55 Dollars

Click below to download an evaluation copy

Note: Evaluation software is limited to a monitoring period of 10 minutes at a time.

Click below to purchase a registration key

Note:when paying, please specify a valid email address as the registration code will be sent to this address, and also any software updates)

VMonitor

Got a great drawing of your network???

Did you create it using a great package like Visio or CAD in order to avail of all the neat network/computer drawing icons and tools???

Feeling like your drawing is a little static......

Well now, you can make your static drawing come alive with ‘VMonitor’. ‘VMonitor’ is like other network polling/monitoring systems except for one difference....it can use your own CAD or Visio drawing as the background thereby providing a network monitoring system which is far more functional and impressive than traditional network monitors. By utilizing the effort that goes in to creating a network drawing, you can now produce a complete monitoring system that will make problem identification easier to perform....and better still, you won’t wait to show it off to your network colleagues

Features....

• Supports bitmap, gif, jpeg, metafiles files as background. Note:CAD and Visio packages can export to jpeg format which is the preferred format.
• Create an unlimited amount of nodes to monitor.
• Send alerts via SMTP, Lotus Notes, Pop-ups (both local and remote)
• Monitors ICMP (i.e. PING) status, port status , disk space free status and Windows System and Application Event logs.
• Easy to set up:.......

     .......Add your own network drawing as a background:

     ........Add objects to represent each device to be monitored:

  ...... determine what you want to monitor for each device.....

  ...... and just let it rip.....

         If you have network drawings that are larger than the viewable area then no problem. Simply load them and use the Navigator Screen               to determine what area of the drawing you want to focus in on:

Cost....only 55 Dollars

Click below to download an evaluation copy

Note: Evaluation software is limited to a monitoring period of 10 minutes at a time.

Click below to purchase a registration key

(Note:when paying, please specify a valid email address as the registration code will be sent to this address, and also any software updates)

NetPCScan

Running a Windows network of 95, 98, NT, 2000 or XP machines??

Do your client PC’s currently run Microsoft Office 2000 Standard or better??

Answer is Yes?

Then you have satisfied the minimum requirements to run ‘NetPCScan’ from your network logon script.

‘NetPCScan’ is a command line utility you simply place in your network logon script. As each user logs on to the network and processes the logon script, NetPCScan scans their PC for the following information:

• Type of client OS, i.e. Windows 95, 98, NT, W2K or XP
• Operating System version (i.e. SP1, SP2, etc).
• Computer Name
• IP address
• Internet Explorer version
• Users network logon name.
• Whether logged on user is a member of their PC’s local administrators group.
• All apps installed on the PC.
• Number of installations of specific apps on your networked PCs (have you the necessary licenses for all your installed apps??)
• List of apps that are set to run on startup (can be used to check for spyware, viruses, etc which typically configure themselves to tun on startup)
• Software changes that are occurring on your networked PC’s (i.e. who’s installing what..)
• Date PC was audited.
• Time PC was audited.

Note: Software does not perform any client installation or change anything on the client. Since the user has either a 95, 98, NT, W2K or XP operating system with Microsoft Office 2000 Standard or better installed, they have satisfied everything the NetPCScan application requires in order to run.

The information gathered from each PC is placed in a Microsoft Access table so that you can easily port the information to Excel for further analysis.

How does it work....

NetPCScan writes its information to a Microsoft Access database file which has to be in a location that users have read/write access to. Lets say this is your network F:\public share for example. Therefore place the ‘NetPCScan.mdb’ file in the F:\public directory along with the NetPCScan.exe executable file.

Next place the following line in your network logon script:

f:\public\NetPCScan f:\public\NetPcScan.mdb

As each user logs on to the network and runs the above line, the NetPCScan utility performs a scan and populates four tables in the NetPCScan.mdb database file with the acquired information. Note: the scan takes a fraction of a second to run and therefore does not impact the time it takes for users to process the logon script. Also, the application does not display any messages (i.e. user is unaware that their PC is being scanned).

The first table in the NetPCScan database file is called ‘Appslist’ and is a table listing every unique application that NetPCScan finds on every PC scanned. This list will be a comprehensive list of all applications installed on your networked PC’s (see sample table below):

However, this in only the beginning. From an administrators perspective, you are more interested in knowing how many instances of specific applications are installed on your networked PC’s. This might be required for licensing, legal or other reasons. Using the above sample list as an example, lets say you need to know how many instances of MicrosoftOfficeProfessionalEdition2003 are installed on your networked PC’s. You therefore tick this application as shown below:

Note: You can tick up to 255 applications to monitor. An app can also be a security update rollout (see how many machines have a particular Microsoft Security update or anything else that typically appears under ‘Add/Remove Programs’ on a PC.

Once you have decided on the applications to monitor, then its time to let NetPCScan do its work. As each user logs on and runs the NetPCScan from the logon script, the application scans the PC for the basic information already defined above (i.e. computer name, IP address, etc). In addition the NetPCScan program also scans for the existence of ticked applications in the ‘appslist’ table and places the collected results in the ‘Auditlist’ table. Shown below is sample ‘auditlist’ table showing information for 5 PC’s showing both the basic information scanned and also information related to the existence of the above ticked application (i.e. MicrosoftOfficeProfessionalEdition2003)

We can see straight away the all 5 PC’s are running Windows XP SP2, Internet Explorer 6 but only 4 of the 5 PC’s are running Microsoft Office Professional 2003 (last column). A ‘1’ in the column indicates the presence of the application, a “0” indicates the application was not found. This table could just as easy contain 500 or 5000 records depending on the number of PCs on your network.

Note: the NetPCScan program considers the computername to be unique to every PC and therefore the ‘Auditlist’ table will contain a single record for every unique computername on your network that runs the logon script (i.e. if 500 PC’s run the logon script, then the ‘auditlist’ table will contain 500 records). As each PC runs the NetPCScan from the logon script the program scans the ‘auditlist’ database to determine if a record already exists for this PC. If it does, then it is updated to reflect the latest data, if it does not, then a new record is added.

The reason why the program represents the existence of a ticked application with a “1” and its nonexistence with a “0” is that so you can copy and paste the entire table of information to Excel and perform a SUM operation on the relevant columns to indicate the total number of installations for the application in question. It might tell you, for example, the you have 300 installed copied of Adobe Professional 6 , do you have 300 licenses for it???

In addition to the above valuable information the NetPCScan program also populate the ‘registry’ table with each unique occurrence of startup app found in the PCs registry. Note: most virus, spyware, worms, etc usually configure themselves so that they run when your PC starts up, so this table should be review regularly for any unfamiliar (i.e. rogue) applications. Below is a sample of the ‘registry’ table:

Note: the ‘registry’ table both lists the startup apps and the computer names it found the apps on.

The final table the NetPCScan utility updates is the ‘audit_changes’ table. This table is updated to reflect the changes that the NetPCScan utility detects between subsequent scans of the same PC. For example, lets assume that you have ticked the MicrosoftOfficeProfessionalEdition2003 application indicating that you want the NetPCScan utility to detect whether the application exists on the PC it is scanning. If during yesterdays scan the application did not exist but during today’s scan the application suddenly exists then the ‘audit_changes’ table is updated to reflect that the user has installed this app since the last scan (see sample ‘audit_changes’ table below):

Similarly, this table is updated whenever a monitored application is un-installed. This table can be useful in determining who is potentially violating your company’s software license regulations.

Cost....only 55 Dollars

Click below to download an evaluation copy

Note: Evaluation software is limited to a monitoring only 10 PCs.

Click below to purchase a registration key

(Note:when paying, please specify a valid email address as the registration code will be sent to this address, and also any software updates)