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Hi everyone,

For the 1.5 release of the Network Monitor, we want to try something a little different and get working features into your hands faster.

Normally, we’d work on whole features until they were complete, or mostly complete, and then ask everyone in the beta group to help test them for issues we can’t find in our environments.

This is great for technical bugs, but it doesn’t do much to catch “logical bugs” where the feature doesn’t work quite right for how people actually want to use it. A good example of this is the online check feature - we didn’t think many people would want to monitor the same host using multiple kinds of check; we were wrong. We’ve fixed it, but we could have fixed it faster.

To help with that, we’re going to be releasing our betas earlier in the process with much rawer features for you all to test. This will help us make any functionality changes to features sooner rather than later.

With all that said, I’d like to announce the first beta of our 1.5 release for Network Monitor:

http://download.spiceworks.com/SpiceworksNetworkMonitor/beta/SpiceworksNetworkMonitor.exe

Right now we don’t have a lot of new features:

  • First cut at a maintenance window feature
  • Behind-the-scenes historical data gathering (no graphs yet)
  • some new bug fixes

Coming in later beta updates:

  • More refined control over maintenance windows
  • Charts and graphs for historical data!
  • Various incremental UI improvements
  • more bug fixes

The maintenance window feature is intended to help you tell the Network Monitor when your backup jobs run, or when you’re turning off a physical server to upgrade its RAM. Right now it’s just an all or nothing checkbox found both on the settings page and on the dashboard here:

but eventually it will have scheduling and device selection to really tune things.

The historical data feature is exactly what it sounds - from this release onwards, we’ll be keeping data for predefined time windows (which we haven’t completely decided upon yet). This release is for just gathering data and testing any impacts on performance or resources required. Future releases will introduce charts so that you can view that data.

So download the beta, install it, try it out and let us know what you think. As always, please ensure you’re doing a fresh install of the beta on a test system that isn’t your production system as we can’t guarantee you won’t run into bugs that might affect the stability of your Network Monitor, especially as we give you early access to features.

Download here: http://download.spiceworks.com/SpiceworksNetworkMonitor/beta/SpiceworksNetworkMonitor.exe

15 Spice ups
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Thanks Tim…great news :slight_smile:

1 Spice up
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Sounds good, but I don’t see a link yet to download?

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Yeah, due to some issues with this group in the community, I’m not able to update links myself. We’re working on getting it updated, but for now, you can use this link: http://download.spiceworks.com/SpiceworksNetworkMonitor/beta/SpiceworksNetworkMonitor.exe

I’ll add the link to the post too.

1 Spice up
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Any plans to add support to esxi monitoring in this version ?

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On it :slight_smile:

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Nice but same question as Haim on propper ESXI monitoring?

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Does this fix the memory issue for the event processor?

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No, not in this version. We’re tackling historical data first, then virtualization after that.

Not sure what memory issue you’re talking about - we significantly reduced the memory footprint of the event processor in 1.4. It’s not likely to get better than it is.

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Hi Tim,
Historical data got more votes then the support of esxi ?

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By a landslide: https://community.spiceworks.com/feature_request/category/22

Historical data will also allow us to do more interesting things when we do get to virtualization support.

1 Spice up
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A minimum of one hour historical would be killer. I went to lunch the other day and our network bleeped for a few minutes. Ended up being an electricians fault, but being able to look back would be great!

Great product!

2 Spice ups