A agent-less monitoring tool to monitor application performance, resource usage and network performance for remote computers from a centralized location.

Features: The name Longitude probably refers to the fact that this software can monitor resource usage, network performance and application performance on any remote computer regardless of what longitude it is located at (i.e. no matter how far the remote computer is). That does seem to be the case, although it should be noted that we have limited testing capabilities when it comes to truly faraway (longitudinally) nodes. To begin with Longitude performs Operating System and Device Monitoring for all specified nodes (it supports versions of Windows, Red Hat and SUSE Linux, IBM AIX, HP UX, SUN Solaris, VMware ESX, and Cisco OS). There are two ways to monitor the resource usage and performance. One is the web-based UI, and the other is an Event Monitor window which is part of the installed application. Both of these provide an interface that lists devices along with their type, application name, and type of event etc. A global map view can display the geographical location of each of the devices being monitored.

Alerts are generated according to severity (this can be set so that only certain severity levels trigger alerts) and the Longitude application can be pre-configured to perform a certain action based on the alert type. Up to 3 transactions can be recorded per device, and Longitude performs automatic consolidations of Windows Event logs. All this information is stored and is available later on for reporting and documentation functions. Interactive web based reports can be created easily with a few clicks. A dashboard also provides real-time statistics information. Longitude can be used to assess SLA compliance through the use of predefined metrics, and measurements on the user side.

Overall: Although an excellent tool, the interface needs some improvement. The tool is mainly targeted towards (and rightly so) administrators, but that is not reason enough for putting in more work towards the development of the product’s interface. The best feature is that the remote monitoring is done without the requirement of an agent, thus time does not need to be wasted installing an agent on all remote computers.