Platform Feature List.

Our platform provides numerous continuously evolving features, listed below. The list is updated regularly, and represents an overview of current capabilities.

Infrastructure Management

Adaptive Ping Engine

• Configurable per poller
• Adapt to network conditions for each monitored device
• Latency and packet loss statistics

SNMP

• Scripted polling engine
• Poll state, statistics, thresholding, and generate alerts
• Customisable controls per polled items
  • Enable, disable, and threshold customisation
  • Global defaults with overrides
• Thresholding over customisable time periods
• Complex polling scenarios with scripting capability
• Poll individual SNMP OID’s or walk SNMP tables
  • Poll results processing with C# scripting for state, statistics and thresholding
• SNMP Access Profile to define snmp community strings, timeouts, retries and custom port settings
• Easy setup using centralised Admin Packs library
• Import device SNMP data to simplify platform configuration for new device types or assist in fault finding
• SNMP trap processing
  • Profile based allowing any trap to be represented with appropriate alert text and severity
  • Topology processing for link availability

HTTP Polling

• HTTP protocol health of websites, web services or web applications
• Customisable scripting engine. Poll multiple content types to capture
  • HTTP protocol response state
  • HTTP response performance statistics
    • Total response time
    • Response breakdown to show performance of different content types (e.g. static vs. data driven content)
• SSL protocol monitoring
  • SSL certificate expiry
  • SSL certificate name mismatch
  • Check and warn if obsolete and vulnerable SSL protocols are enabled

DNS Polling

• Customisable DNS polling
  • Supports all relevant DNS record queries, e.g. A, MX, NS, URI, CNAME etc
  • Query response validated against pre-configured values
  • Generate alerts if DNS response not as expected

API Polling

• Flexible API based polling, customisable to query various APIs, e.g. 
  • Viptela vManage
  • VMware vCenter
• Supports multiple authentication methods to the API
• Customisable polling scripts for each API
• Simple import of discovered devices into platform for monitoring
• Supports API based polling of devices for 
  • State
  • Statistics
  • Thresholding

NetFlow and sFlow Collection

• Breakdown of NetFlow or sFlow information
  • Top Talkers
  • Top Listeners
  • Top Conversations
  • Top Applications
  • Top Protocols
  • Top Types of Service

Syslog

• Generate alerts
• Collect and store Syslog with search capability
• C# scripting for customisation

TACACS AAA

• Managed devices can use poller as a TACACS AAA server
• Authentication
  • Gemmb database used to authenticate access to the device
  • Integrates to Configuration Harvest engine to allow for a randomised one-time password
• Authorisation
  • Use the Gemmb security system to define the access rights a person has to the device
  • Administrator or Non-Administrator (read-only) access
• Accounting
  • Record all authentication attempts
  • Record commands issued to the device
  • Accounting information is secured using the platform's security system

Configuration Harvesting

• Flexible scripting engine
• Issue any command to a device and record output to be saved as configuration documents
• Documents saved and compared to previous version
• Utilise Telnet, SSH, or SNMP initiated TFTP protocols
• Configurable time of day for the daily schedule

Poller

• Available for Windows, Linux, and Docker
• Poller assignment
  • Default customer poller
  • Deploy multiple poller within a customer
  • Assign to region, location, or per device
• Poller administration and deployment
  • Roles based
  • Delegate poller deployment per your requirements
  • Allow customer to deploy pollers if required
• Flexible poller configuration
  • Ping engine “dead-time”
  • SNMP poll interval
  • HTTP poll interval
  • Protocol ports – NetFlow, Syslog listening ports
  • Statistical rollup period
• Simple upgrade
• Self monitoring
• Comprehensive in-built “watch dog”
  • Automated recovery from rare software failures
  • Automated recovery from failed upgrade process
• Overdue (offline) poller notification
• Backup poller registration
• Dynamic IP address support
  • Dynamic IP address resolution of devices that do not have fixed IP addresses and utilise dynamic DNS

Master Poller

• Available for Windows,  Linux and Docker
• Allow multiple customers to be polled by a single Master Poller. A truly multi-tenanted poller
• Create a Virtual Poller for a customer on a Master Poller
• The Virtual Poller appears like a standard poller, allowing assignment to regions, location, devices or as customer default
• Utilised in cases where a Managed Service Provided has already invested in connectivity to multiple customers from their data centre
• Handles routing to different customers if required
• Ideal for Internet Service Providers or MPLS Service Providers where all customer devices are reachable from a core monitoring network

Scheduling

• Poll 24x7 or according to specified schedule
  • Time zone aware
  • Customisable for each polled item

CMDB IP Address Conflict Management

• Auto-detection of duplicate IP address in the CMDB where there is a polling conflict
• The CMDB allows any IP address to be assigned to any device, but if a poller is assigned two devices with the same address, the conflicting assignment is denied and a report is issued to the administrator

Topology Discovery

• The polling topology of a customer's managed devices is discovered
• Topology discovery and dependencies will handle cases where not all devices are managed by the service provider
• Dynamic integrated topology display on web site.
  • Quick visualisation of network topology and the state of each managed device
• Integrates into service desk
  • Used for root cause analysis
  • If multiple devices become unreachable, the topological information allows a single ticket to be created for the entire “incident”

Snmp Network Discovery

• Discovery of devices on the network using Snmp
  • Import discovered devices and locations into the Cmdb for monitoring
  • Supports import using the Gemmb Import tool for ease of editing of discovery results

Connector

• Automated “One Click” access to monitored devices
• Secure AES-256 encryption, using a one-time encryption key for all connectivity
• Built-in support for Http/Https, Telnet, SSH, and RDP protocols
• Connection brokered by poller
• All traffic is outbound from the poller and from the operator's PC
  • Simplified customer firewall rules. In most cases, no customer firewall rule changes are required
  • Compatible with most proxy servers
    • Basic and Integrated authentication support
• Integrates into the platform's Password Vault system
  • Connect without revealing credentials to operator
• Supports two-factor authentication

Tools

• User initiated tools for remote troubleshooting
  • SNMP Live Query
  • Ping
  • Trace Route
  • Connector
    • Remote Desktop
    • Telnet
    • Ssh
    • Http/Https
  • Shell
  • PowerShell
  • Windows Desktop Sharing
  • Windows Services list/start/restart/stop
  • Windows Processes list/terminate
  • Live Server Stats (CPU, memory, disk, etc)
  • Windows Update

Web Site

• Status display
  • Supports complex hierarchical device configurations
  • Aggregates device status for quick status overview
• Alerts dashboard
  • Integrated with service desk
  • Acknowledgement of alerts
    • Adapts to customers' auto ticketing configuration
    • Assign to tickets
    • Create new tickets
    • Acknowledge only
• Statistics display
  • Supports complex hierarchical device configurations
  • Custom time selection and data aggregation
    • Display raw data where supported
    • Day by hour analysis (a.k.a. "busy hour")
  • Export statistics data to Excel
• Monitoring tools at your fingertips
  • SNMP Live Query
  • Ping
  • Trace Route
  • Connector
  • Accessible from all relevant parts of the web site
    • ​Integrated with service desk
    • Integrated with monitoring
    • Integrated with CMDB
    • Integrated with topology
    • Windows Services start/stop

Server Monitoring

Server Agent

• Available for Windows and Linux
• Light-weight (100MB RAM and minimal CPU usage)
• Central configuration via web site
• Flexible, scripted monitoring engine
  • Monitor any aspect of the server environment
• Monitor state, statistics, thresholding, and generate alerts
• Customisable controls per monitored items
  • Enable, disable, and threshold customisation
  • Global defaults with overrides
• Thresholding over customisable time periods
• Just-in-time Windows remote desktop access 

Scheduling

• Monitor 24x7 or according to specified schedule
  • Time zone aware
  • Customisable for each monitored item

Shell and PowerShell

• Execute shell / PowerShell scripts on the computers directly from website​

Windows Desktop Sharing

• Secure desktop sharing using the Server Agent as host
• Uses Connector application as the client
  • View or interact with user's session
    • Level of access is customisable
  • View or interact with elevated privilege desktops (Windows Secure Desktop)
    • Level of of access is customisable

Windows Event Log Monitoring

• Flexible and easily customisable
  • Select which event logs to monitor
  • Select Event Levels to monitor
  • Select individual Event IDs to monitor
  • Select which Event Levels to alert on
    • Integrated with Service Desk
    • Automatic ticket creation

Windows Update

• Mnitoring of Windows Updates
  • Alerting on overdue updates
• Management of Windows Updates
  • Regularly check for and automatically install updates
• Manual Windows Updates via the website (check / download / install) including optional updates

Windows Desktop Sharing

• Secure desktop sharing using the Server Agent as host

AWS Monitoring

Utilises AWS CloudWatch API

• Collect data from various AWS services, e.g.
  • EC2
  • RDS
  • ELB
• Poller can poll any metric exposed by CloudWatch
• Collect status, statistics and thresholding information
  • Individual configuration per AWS metric
  • Global threshold settings with individual overrides
• Data collected is integrated into platform features such as
  • Alerting
  • Service Desk
  • Reporting

CMDB

Custom CMDB

• Create fully customised Cmds, using custom templates and properties
• Custom properties
  • Supports many different data types, eg. date time, integer, string, boolean, configurable select values etc.
  • Supports custom validation for each property
  • Supports encrypted storage of property values in the database
  • Monitoring allowed for date time properties
    • Three levels of thresholding
  • Calculated properties
    • Calculate duration between date time properties
    • Calculate new date time from date time property and duration (time span)
    • Scripted properties
      • Flexible scripting to calculate a property's value based on any other properties of the CI
• Configuration item (CI) templates
  • Build custom CI templates for each type of CI, with all necessary properties for that type 
• Define relationships between CIs
• Attach files to CIs
• Assign CIs to tickets
• CI Extensions
  • Extend the platform's existing configuration items with custom properties. The following configuration items support extensions:
    • Contact
    • Cost centre
    • Customer
    • Device
    • Device group
    • User
    • User group

CMDB Import and Export

Excel Add-In

• Download the Gemmb Import Excel Add-In to enable import into the CMDB from Excel
  • Utility sets up the required worksheets for data entry
  • Simplifies bulk import of items during on-boarding
  • Data is validated against back end CMDB before import
• Supports export of customer data from CMDB to Excel
• Supports export of SNMP device discovery to Excel for easy of editing
  • Import edited data into CMDB
• Uses the Web API for communication
  • Supported over the internet or intranet
  • Secured by the same login and access as the website

CMDB Sync

• Connect to external databases and execute SQL scripts to gather CMDB data from other sources
  • Map the external data fields to the platform's relevant items and properties
  • Platform validates data before importing
  • Can execute the queries on a schedule

Service Desk

ITIL Support

• Incident, Change and Problem ticket, and Service request support

Integrated

• Complete integration into the platform's monitoring system
• Integration into service management
• Secured by platform's security system

Team Oriented

• Team based ticket assignment
• Automatic or manual assignment

Ticket Groups and Routing

• Ticket groups allow for predefined configuration information
• Tickets are routed to an appropriate ticket group on creation
• Customisable ticket auto closure times
• Predefined team assignments
• Approver teams for Change tickets
• Roles based ticket suspension duration
  • For example, Level 1 can suspend for 8 hours, whilst Level 3 can suspend for 24 hours
• Customisable closure code definitions
  • Capture root cause when a ticket is closed
  • Report on closure code
  • Optionally set closure code to allow filtering from Reporting system
• Adjust ticket priority based on time of day
  • Time zone aware
  • Weekday, Saturday and Sunday configurations
• Change priority or disable ticket creation based on predefined hours
  • Tightly match the customer requirements, for example: “Don’t create tickets between 9pm and 7am on Sundays because the power is always cut to the building”
• Ticket assignment to team and team members
  • Automatic and manual
  • Assign to team member based on current ticket work load and individual’s availability

Extensible

• Ticket extensions
  • Custom properties for tickets
  • Supports many different data types, eg. date time, integer, string, boolean, configurable select values etc.
  • Supports custom validation for each property
  • Supports encrypted storage of property values in the database
  • Calculated properties
    • Calculate duration between date time properties
    • Calculate new date time from date time property and duration (time span)
    • Scripted properties
      • Flexible scripting to calculate a property's value based on any other ticket properties

Auto Ticketing

• Customisable auto ticketing rules for infrastructure monitoring alerts
  • Fully automatic
    • Create and assign to tickets based on poller logic
    • Uses network topology and alert for correlation and root cause analysis
  • Semi automatic
    • Control assignment to existing tickets
    • Restrict creation of new tickets
  •  Manual
    • Poller will generate alerts only, not tickets
    • User acknowledgement of alerts initiates ticket creation or assignment
• Control device to ticket assignment, with options to
  • Force one ticket per alert
  • Allow only a single device per ticket
  • Allow root cause analysis and multiple devices per ticket within a customer

Multi-Tenant Service Desk

• Differentiate service provider and customer tickets
• Allow customers to create tickets in their own isolated Ticket Group
• Share tickets easily and securely
• Include customers in key processes such as Change Management

Support for SLA

• Define Response and Resolution SLA
  • Tailor to ticket priority
• Driven by the service catalog
  • SLA is dependent on the service catalog “purchased” by the customer
• Time zone and business hours aware
  • Pause SLA outside predefined hours
  • Time zone definable per device (by its location), or can be a predefined time zone
• Support for service level based timers to trigger events for notification or external integration
  • Response timer to capture initial interaction with ticket
  • Resolution timer to track overall resolution progress
  • Update timer separately configurable for open and suspended tickets to track timely interaction with tickets

Device Assignment

• Automated assignment of devices to tickets
• Automated SLA assessment based on assigned devices

Ticket Templates

• Create predefined templates to present to your users and customers
• Capture relevant information for ticket creation
• Use to create Incident, Change, Problem or Request tickets
  • Route tickets
  • Automate ticket assignment to teams and team members
• Use Html editor to customise input form

Ticket Search

• Search customer tickets based on many criteria
• Free text search of ticket and journal information
• Export results to Excel for easy reporting

Ticket Structure

• Journals
  • Private journals. Flag a journal as only readable by “your” staff
  • Upload files to a journal
  • Edit or delete can be controlled by security
  • Draft journals
• Contact assignment
  • Automatic and manual
  • Primary and secondary contacts
  • Tailor notifications. For example, primary contacts become “Email To”, and secondary contacts are “Email CC” addresses
• Complete visibility of alerts assigned to ticket
  • Acknowledge alerts directly in ticket
  • Alerts control ticket state
  • Disable ticket closure if there are unacknowledged alerts
  • Suspended ticket moved to “In Progress” when there are new alerts
• Ticket state drives SLA timers
• Associate related ticket
  • Alert routing aware of related tickets to optimise routing of alerts to an appropriate ticket
• Business Service assignment
  • Automatic and manual
• Upload files to tickets
• History and service level conformance logs
• Ticket closure
  • Resolved status places ticket in an "Auto Close" status. Allows customer to intervene prior to final automated closure
  • Closure code captured for reporting

Web Site

• Ticket dashboard
  • Integrated into infrastructure monitoring
  • Integrated into SLA from service management
  • Operator sign-in
    • Team selection
    • Support for multiple teams per operator
    • Used by automatic ticket assignment algorithm

Knowledge Management

Knowledge Bases

• Support for multiple knowledge bases
• Knowledge articles support mappings to
  • Devices
  • Business Services
  • Contacts
  • Tickets

Integrated

• Integrated into tickets and devices, where relevant knowledge articles are suggested to the user

External System Integration

Integration Profiles

• Customisable for external systems, e.g. ServiceNow
• Supports SOAP and REST API
• Define data mappings between the platform and external system

​Service Desk Events

• Supports two way integration
  • Local events trigger outbound integration
  • External system events call inbound methods
• Define triggers on service desk events configurable for all available ticket types, e.g.
  • Ticket creation
  • Ticket update
  • Assignment change
  • State change
  • Timer events
    • SLA triggers
  • Journal events
    • Create
    • Read
    • Update
    • Delete

External Applications

• Configurable with OAuth to access Gemmb Api data
• Linked from web site menu for easy access

Service Management

Service Catalogs

• Build your service porfolio by creating service catalog items
• Service catalog items are a collection of services and service levels
• Assignable to devices
• Secured by platform's security system
• Control who can assign service catalog items
• Customise as required
  • Create service provider “common” service catalog items
  • Customise for specific customers

Services

• Represent platform infrastructure monitoring capabilities
• Create services by bundling monitoring capabilities
• Controlled and secured by platform's security system

Service Levels

• Control the applicable SLA in tickets
• Define SLA timers based on ticket priority
• Time zone aware SLA coverage times
• Coverage times customisable to meet business hours and support requirements

Service Management Report

• Reports on all service catalog to device assignments
• Export to Excel for quick reporting

Eventing and Notification Engine

Notification Profiles

• Highly customisable
• Format email or SMS notification templates using HTML editor
• Multi-lingual and time zone aware
• Customises each email to the recipient's time zone
• Selects correct language template based on the recipient's language settings

Event Driven

• Associate events to notification profiles
• Events such as ticket creation, ticket update or journal creation are supported
• Extensible scripting for customisation of events

Third Party Integration

• Associate events with outbound API calls
• Full access to the data associated with the event, such as ticket information, journal data
• Make HTTP calls to third party systems
  • Include HTTP headers and authentication information in outbound HTTP request
  • Uses C# scripting for complete flexibility

Reporting

Word Add-In

• Download the Word Add-In for easy reporting
• Reporting object provided as standard Microsoft Word charts, tables or embedded Excel spreadsheets
• Template driven
  • Create the report structure once as a template, and process the report multiple times, when needed
  • Supports batch processing of multiple customers' reports based on same template
• Supports business hours and between hours reporting
• Supports reporting split by locations, regions, device types or device groups
• Reporting objects can be styled to any supported Word style. You can customise colours, fonts, chart styles, edit titles, descriptions etc.
• Uses the Reporting API to get data from the back end
  • Supported over the internet or intranet
  • Secured by the same login and access as the website

Platform Security

Hierarchical

• Supports inheritance
• Intuitive administration

Comprehensive

• Over 40 secured item types
  • Devices, Locations, Regions, Users, User Groups, Pollers, Password Vaults, etc.
• Security Access Systems
  • Functional grouping of the platform's major components, for example Service Desk, CMDB, Monitoring, AAA etc.
• Granular assignment of permissions
  • Permissions are customised depending on item type and access system
• Roles are a combination of permissions assigned to a user group
  • Members of that user group assume that role
• The security system is also secured by platform's security system
• You can create new Security administrator roles for specific access systems and item types
  • Each item type has a Security flag for each access system. Assigning this flag to a role allows Security administration of that item type
  • You have full control of delegation of Security administration to each item type in each access system
    • Service providers can delegate platform administration to each of their customers, if required

Two-Factor Authentication

• Supports two-factor authentication
• Utilises one-time password
  • Used for logging in to web site 
  • Used to further secure access to resources
    • Only allow access for users who have two-factor authentication enabled
    • Reauthenticate users using two-factor authentication before allowing access to these resources

Single Sign-On

• Supports OpenID and SAML based enterprise identity providers
  • Supports automatic user creation
  • Supports automatic user group assignment
• Supports authentication using public identity providers
  • Google
  • WeChat
• Supports Active Directory
  • Supports automatic user group assignment
  • Requires Windows Agent

Web Site UI

Rebranding

• Supports rebranding and custom URL (domain)

Globalisation

• Multi-lingual, with translation administration facility
• Time zone aware

Secure

• Secured by platform's security system
• Display adapts to user roles
• Supports customer roles
• Supports service providers roles
• Supports two-factor authentication

Responsive

• Built using HTML 5 and Javascript
• Mobile friendly

Complete Platform Feature Coverage

• Web driven platform, securely accessible from anywhere
  • Web site contains all aspects of the platform
  • Administration from web site
  • Monitoring tools available from web site
  • Apps (Connector, Reporter, Import) installed from web site
  • No central management console required

Web API Driven

• All web site capabilities are available via core Web API

Web API

Comprehensive

• Provides comprehensive access to all system capabilities
  • Allows integration to any external application capable of performing web requests
  • Built using Microsoft's Web API technology
  • Supports a broad range of clients and data formats

Secured

• API accessible to all authenticated users
• API Key support for easy programmatic integration to third party systems
  • API Key used to identify a user account
  • Permissions granted based on role
• Access, permissions and data is secured by the platform's security system

Easy to Use

• RESTful by nature
• All API objects and methods are documented, with samples