Feature suggestions: Alerts, syslog, command triggers, history pane

Hi!
I am currently trying NetGenius in my little lab-network. It seems like a nifty little tool at a reasonable price.

My question is: Do you on your roadmap have plans for some alerting mechanism? For example:
1. Logging alerts (new processes connecting and such) to a syslog server from each computer running the service.
2. Trigger a command line on alert. I prefer that over email-alerting as the only option because it is easy to set up sending of email on alert via the command line. Preferably, alerting should be possible to set from one console to every machine, even if the target machine only runs the service.

Also, I wish there was a configurable delay when showing processes connecting. Or a history pane with configurable time span, last hour, last day, or something like that. I did a test with a tool that does a lot of very short requests/connects to the outside world. The tool flashes up in the main display for a second, then disappears. If I wasn't deliberately looking at the main console when it ran, I would no have noticed. I had a quick look at the SQLite db, and the tool is registered there. I guess I could make some reports or something based on that, but it would be convenient to have in the main console and not have to make some scheduled reporting task on the db itself.

By the way, major, major kudos to you for having a forum that does not require registration! A lot more companies should follow your example!
Have a nice day.

Regards,
Chico

Thank you for the feedback. Unfortunately we are not planning to implement any kind of alerts, especially syslog. The reason for that is two-fold:

• NetGenius core runs as a service. It has no user interface to display those alerts when they occur.
• Syslog is something from the Unix world, and an average user would have no idea what it is or how to use it.

We would like to keep NetGenius as simple and as user-friendly as possible, and only add essential features. If you really need syslog, you could use a script launched at periodic intervals that would analyse the database and send the events to a syslog server.

Regarding the history, processes that run for a short time are only shown as long as they live. After that, the application usage information is available in the Usage section. If you need a detailed log of what application connected to the Internet and when it did that, I am afraid NetGenius is not the right choice. You probably need a dedicated firewall with extensive logging functionality instead.