NetPro is the leading provider of directory infrastructure management solutions. NetPro software monitors, troubleshoots and optimizes the directory to ensure the availability and performance of the business-critical applications that depend upon it. Proactive directory management enables administrators to reduce administrative costs, minimize network downtime and optimize resources. NetPro partners include Novell, Inc. and Microsoft* Corp., and its customer list features such Fortune 500 companies as Arthur Andersen, DaimlerChrysler, General Motors, and J.P. Morgan.

Monitoring Novell eDirectory in numerous off-site locations can require significant time, effort and expense. Indeed, without a solution in place to centrally monitor from a single location, it is nearly impossible to be aware of problems before they cause downtime. Certified Novell Engineer (CNE^sm) Steve Brueck understands the responsibilities and challenges of managing NDS remotely. From the Sam A. Moss Service Center in Tucker, Georgia, he helps to manage the DeKalb County School System's network of 170 NetWare servers, most of them located in the school system's 130 remote sites.

"We needed a way to stay one step ahead of network problems and ensure the reliability of the directory," says Brueck. The DeKalb school system's high server volume and number of remote locations made it difficult for Brueck to conduct manual NDS healthchecks before making changes or adding servers to his NDS tree. "We ran manual healthchecks on certain servers, but it was prohibitive to run a comprehensive NDS healthcheck on a network of this size," he explains.

In early 1998, DeKalb County Schools found the right solution for its remote eDirectory management challenges in DS Expert, NetPro's eDirectory monitoring and alerting software. DS Expert constantly checks for eDirectory error conditions and alerts on problems instantly. With DS Expert, Brueck can view the entire eDirectory tree from a single console and receive alerts on critical problems such as replication latency and synchronization errors before they impact the integrity of the directory and result in server downtime.

eDirectory is a loosely consistent database that performs differently depending upon the network architecture. DS Expert provides infinitely tunable thresholds that respond to specific network architectures, enabling busy administrators to decide what constitutes a critical alert—and what doesn't. With DS Expert, administrators decide how closely to watch their directory, knowing that they'll be alerted immediately if there's a problem—and they aren't bothered by meaningless alerts when all is well.

DeKalb County School System is busy upgrading its existing NetWare 3.x servers to 4.11, with plans to further migrate to NetWare 5 in the coming months. Future plans also call for increasing its NetWare investment from 170 servers to as many as 300 servers by the end of this year. As the school system upgrades its network and adds additional Novell networking solutions such as ZENworks®, Brueck finds DS Expert to be invaluable. He receives alerts on time sync errors on new servers, and DS Expert notifies him when a server is not responding—no matter where it's located. And now, there's no need to conduct a manual eDirectory healthcheck prior to adding new servers or changing his eDirectory configuration—DS Expert does it automatically.

For NetPro customers such as DeKalb County School System, DS Expert helps ensure 24X7 access to files, applications and other directory-enabled resources. "DS Expert has been a tremendous help in keeping the network up and running as we've upgraded and added servers," says Brueck. "It has streamlined our eDirectory monitoring efforts and helped us manage our entire network more effectively." Unlike server-based monitors, DS Expert does not lose access to critical data when a server is down. DS Expert's distributed service architecture allows system administrators to correct eDirectory errors before they have a chance to impact users and productivity.

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