Metriscope (with Windows Pack) Editor's Review

MetriScope is a visual monitoring tool. It allows the user to view real-time or historic data about any computer in his or her network. Also, the user can define alarms which can be triggered when a certain condition is no longer satisfied. Each alarm has an associated action. Possible actions are running an executable, sending an email and showing a popup message. For example you could define an alert which would be triggered when available memory drops below 128 MB.

The program's user interface looks astonishing. When you first start the program you have to define a connection to the computer which you want to monitor. Then you connect, and nice looking general information is shown on screen. More specific information about the computer you are monitoring is also available. All you have to do is select, from the tree view on the left, the items that are of interest to you. If you want to have all the information you need on a single page you can define a custom page. The custom page can contain any of the information that WMI offers, like memory usage, disk space, paging activity, cache information, processor occupancy, port resources and many more.

The foundations for manageability in Windows operating systems are Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI; formerly known as WBEM). WMI is the default information datasource for this program. The user can select the refresh interval and how many hours of data the program should record. It's also possible to generate all kinds of reports containing data that the program previously gathered.

Pluses: Plug-in based, so it's simple to add extra functionality. You can download a monitoring package and import it into the program.

Drawbacks / flaws: Sometimes the application generates an internal error but it doesn't freeze or exit.

In conclusion: A very successful combination of nice looks and functionality makes MetriScope one of the best monitoring tools I have ever tried. I would say that this program is both for home users who can use it for troubleshooting, as well as for system administrators who can monitor critical applications within their network.

version reviewed: 3.1.0