The latest EventSentry update brings significant and very exciting changes to the free light edition, EventSentry Light.
We have always seen EventSentry Light as a successor to the original EventwatchNT – a monitoring tool for small networks to alert sysadmins by sending real-time alerts about event log activity. As its big brother EventSentry continued to mature, most features from EventSentry made it into the light edition as well: Service Monitoring, Disk Space Monitoring, Performance Monitoring and many more. Since EventSentry Light was, and continues to be, free, it needed to distinguish itself from the commercial edition. As such, most feature were somewhat restricted in the light edition which only allowed a limited number of packages, event log filters, performance counters and such.
Over the last year we’ve been getting feedback that EventSentry Light was being constrained too much. Since our goal is, and always has been, to empower sysadmins and not constrain them, we decided to provide our users with more functionality in the free edition. The result of these efforts is build 2.93.1.75, and with this release you can:
- Monitor event logs and log files in real time, setting up as many filter rules as you’d like, without restrictions.
- Utilize all advanced event log filter capabilities like thresholds, timers, schedules and more!
- Create as many event log, log file and system health packages as you like.
- Utilize all system health monitoring features, such as file checksum monitoring, performance monitoring, service monitoring and more.
- Create a variety of alerts using mail, HTTP, SNMP traps, Syslog messages and more.
- Receive SNMP traps from SNMP v3 enabled devices.
- Monitor up to 2 full hosts and 2 network devices.
Pretty impressive, no? So literally overnight, EventSentry Light has matured into a full-fledged monitoring solution which will alert IT professionals like sysadmins of critical (event) log events, performance issues and much more. What differences with EventSentry remain? A few, but the line is much more clear now:
- Reporting. With EventSentry, you get log consolidation, software/hardware inventory, performance trend reports, network dashboards, jobs, JSON/XML/CSV/… APIs and more.
- Compliance. EventSentry includes a variety of compliance functionality such as process tracking, logon tracking, account management tracking and more.
- Monitor multiple hosts. Monitor as many hosts as you are licensed for, and also utilize command line utilities to automate remote host management.
- Support. EventSentry includes quality email and phone support, something we pride ourselves on. EventSentry Light offers forum support.
- Mobile iPhone & Android apps are only available in the full edition since they require reporting.
So if you’re not already using EventSentry Light, or using an older version, then you should give it a try. It’s as free as it gets with no registration required, no advertisements and no nagging pop-ups. We hope you like it as much as we do. And did I mention that you can seamlessly upgrade from EventSentry Light to EventSentry? 🙂