Panorama9

Panorama9 ($1.50 per user per month; free available) is a cloud-based IT management platform that offers administrators real-time tracking on company assets, availability, security vulnerabilities, and compliance. All the information from all the computers in the organization is automatically gathered and rolled up in a high-level overview. Administrators can easily drill down to find the precise issue and the actual machine.

Panorama9 offers small to mid-sized companies a way to manage a long list of IT tasks through a single "pane of glass," using the Software as a Service (SaaS) platform. The system also recently added patch management capabilities, in which the monitoring server tracks what software and operating system each computer on the network is running, and updates older software to the latest versions. Similar tools include Spiceworks (free), Nagios (open source) and GFI Max.

Unfortunately, Panorama9 is currently only available for Windows machines. The company is currently working on an agent for Macs. This review looks at version 2.6.9.

Panorama9 is different from most monitoring applications in that it doesn't require agents to be installed on to every single machine. This can be a logistical nightmare for administrators to manage, and some systems can't have other software installed?even if it is a management tool. Instead, Panorama9 takes advantage of Microsoft's Active Directory to communicate with all other computers on the domain. The agent software is installed on only one computer, which acts as a centralized server, and that machine gathers information from others on the network before pushing it up to the cloud platform.

Features
With Panorama9, administrators can gain remote control of machines, create network maps, monitor all the systems in a network, receive text or email notifications when something goes wrong, generate reports reflecting network status, manage users, keep track of licenses being used within the organization, patch management, and track hardware assets. Thanks to the easy-to-use IT dashboard, administrators are able to see security threats or vulnerabilities, system availability, track compliance policies, and gain a complete asset management overview.

The features available vary by the type of subscription plan the customer selects. The free version has limited features, supporting vulnerability and availability monitoring and compliance and asset management. Only one user is available for the free version. The "Small" plan ($0.89 per device per month) supports three users and has all the capabilities in the free version as well as the ability to monitor three Websites. The "Regular" plan ($1.50 per device per month) supports unlimited number of users, same capabilities as the free version, unlimited number of Websites, a network map to see all the monitored devices, the ability to generate reports and receive email and SMS notifications. The "Enterprise" version ($2.25 per device per month) has everything the regular version offers, as well as patch management capabilities.

Agent 1-2-3
When a customer signs up for Panorama9, a confirmation email containing a download link for the agent software and login credentials for the dashboard is sent to the customer Inbox. The email lays out the installation process in a 1-2-3 list and has a few helpful hints. There's also a link to a video that explains how the agent works.

The server on which Panorama9 would be installed requires .NET Framework version 3.5. When the install wizard started, I checked off the "enable deployment" option and entered the username and password for an administrator account on a Microsoft Active Directory domain. After installation, the agent uses the credentials to gather information from the other computers on the domain.

The information is asked in the wizard because it's stored only on this central computer. Panorama9's cloud servers never see this information, which should reassure security administrators.

As programs go, Panorama9 is quite low-impact, with no icons or folders on the system. It installed two services, one to perform the actual monitoring, and another that updates the agent when a newer version is available.

Getting Started With the Cloud
Once the agent was installed, I logged into the Web-based dashboard from the same machine. The helpful confirmation email advised me to wait ten minutes before logging in to give the agent time to send data about the server as well as others in the network. That ten minute interval may just be applicable to large networks. When I checked the dashboard five minutes later, data from all four machines were already on the system.

I didn't have to enable deployment on the central server to automatically gather data from other machines. I could follow a more manual process by logging into the dashboard and downloading the agent individually on each machine. This is tedious, and also took much longer for the data to be transferred to the dashboard. While this lets me add machines on other subnets and different domains to the same dashboard, I far preferred letting the serverdo the bulk of the work.

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